


Kansas City Shuffle

by grayglube, hasitsclaws



Category: From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series
Genre: Ass Play, Bloodplay, Canon Divergent, Codependency, Dubious Consent, F/M, Mindfuck, Old Man Seth, Religious Guilt, culebra kate, post-season two
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-18
Updated: 2018-03-30
Packaged: 2018-08-15 07:59:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 51,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8048533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grayglube/pseuds/grayglube, https://archiveofourown.org/users/hasitsclaws/pseuds/hasitsclaws
Summary: He’s shown up, rung the doorbell. He thinks he’s been subtle, she thinks about how easy it was for him to find her. Classic movie plot, the person who’s supposed to be dead runs back to the last place they think someone will look, the same place all their stuff still is.  He’s not going to save her from her slow decay and she’s not going to believe the lie he might tell her about him being able to.





	1. Miss Havisham

**Author's Note:**

> takes place at the end of S2, Kate is turned into a culebra after she's shot and was never possessed by Amaru.

 

* * *

 

 

_'to begin, she blinds_

_herself of memory_

 

_and suddenly his hands are_

_a deer born in the dark,’_

 

_-Scherezade Siobhan_

 

 

It wasn’t Richie like she thought it would be, it was Scott.

 

There’s the liquid nothing of her life and then she might as well be sleeping, her body on the verge of a rude awakening. It starts like a pin prick and it ends convincing her that she’s in hell, burning alive.

 

Her guts hurt, the bullets don’t push out like they do in the PG-13 horror movies she’s seen that have ill-prepared her for the more unnatural occurrences she’s been party to witness in the last year.

 

There’s pain and there’s nothing else. She is alone draped in a shroud that smells like the trunk of a car and the spare tire.

 

It’s the solitude that weighs on her heart, she’s been abandoned for better things, for other people, for bigger glories than what her little life became.

 

She rises less like Lazarus and more like a comet shattering into earth’s orbit, her bones creak, her mouth tastes like venom. She spits onto the dirt. Her wobbly limbs try to stand, she is all colt legs and trembling, she's so very tired.

 

The Winnebago is the eight tons of metaphorical elephant. The keys are still in it, there’s a half tank of gas to take her two hundred and fifty miles away towards something that doesn’t smell like ozone and blood.

 

She tries not to feel too raw over it, she’d told them to go, to leave. She told them she was staying, she did.

 

She died, they left.

 

Leaving sounds good. She gets gone.

 

* * *

 

When they are safe, that's when it begins to eat at them. There are no distractions good enough, booze and women and sharp things aren’t as treacherous as snakes and Gods. They soon become bored of it.

 

Their business blooms, they reap the benefits, and life is empty.

 

Richie feels like he’s passing an eternity waiting and fearing for his brother to die, waiting and fearing for nothing.

 

They are sitting in the back room counting all their money when Seth says it. “She’s out there, y’know.” He hasn’t slept well the past year, when he’s really drunk or high Richie can hear him whisper her name in his sleep.

 

“I thought that made you happy,” he answers, his brother’s gaze drops to the floor.

 

“She isn't the same anymore, Richie. Here we are living it up like kings, and she’s out there in the world eating people to live. She's never going to forgive us for that.”

 

His first instinct is to deny, deny, deny. He had nothing to do with it, after all.

 

Scott made the choice to turn his sister into something she did not want to become.

 

If Richie had known she was still alive he wouldn’t have abandoned her. His brother seems to think he doesn’t have a heart left, but he always had a soft spot for her kindness.

 

“More like you won't forgive yourself. You're broken.”

 

“ _You_ broke me. She tried to patch it up, I spit in her face, she left, _you_ let her get turned into a monster.”

 

“I'm not the one that bit her.”

 

“No, you were just content to let her die.”

 

And he cannot bring his eyes up from the floor. “You're being irrational.”

 

“She never wanted to be a monster.”

 

“Then why hasn't she killed herself yet?”

 

“How do you know she hasn't?” Seth looks broken by that, too, the idea that she isn't out there, somewhere.

 

“I can feel her.”

 

“How?”

 

“Kismet.”

 

Something like rage fills Seth's expression, loss and grief and pure regret, he still hasn't gone through the five stages completely. “You don’t even care. Do you? I mean you’re here, sucking and fucking barely legals and making margaritas, fucking kismet that.”

 

“You're just mad because you never got to taste her cherry pie.”

 

“Fuck you. Don’t fucking say that shit.”

 

“Don't tell me you didn't want it.”

 

“Look who’s talking." Seth waits for a denial, Richie doesn't have one. His brother scoffs, "Yeah, thought so. You still let her die anyway." Seth slams his fist onto the desk, the impact sends a rush of blood to his knuckles, Richie can smell it even across the room.

 

“If you saw her again would you get on your knees and beg forgiveness?”

 

Seth side eyes him. “Would you?”

 

He doesn't miss a beat, "Only if she let me eat her pussy after."

 

“Fuck off, Richie.”

 

* * *

 

It’s gristle and tar, thick like molasses and her fingers stick together, tacky, like dried glue. It smells rotten, spoiled, like milk someone forgot in the back of the fridge, like hamburger grease. It has her gagging when she sniffs at it.

 

Any trace of _Kate_ left in her is revolted, wants to retch, run, hide. But she has to drink it--

 

Animal’s blood never slides down easy. She goes to the butcher shops where everyone speaks Spanish and slang because they ask the least amount of questions, mice are always quiet with a snake in the den. The offal isn’t fresh but it tastes as rusty as fresh does and under the sweet decay of rot there’s vitality.

 

Her insides feel like they’re shriveling with every sip not taken from something alive, she’s lacking serious nutrients, there’s no soul in the detritus left behind after the prime cuts are removed. Her life is a collection of nights spent in cycles of fasting and pain where a ravenous feeling sits inside of her ribs, a stone hand crushing her heart.

 

She wanders around the States in those first few years, up and down one coast, across the midwest, back down to the south. She leaves a trail of hunger in her wake, every day feels like _she’s_ rotting, there’s a snake in her gut that’s gnawing at her, she needs to feed on something, _someone_ tangible, but she will become a martyr if that’s what living forever demands of her.

 

She’d found Scott, weeks after she woke up. Really, she’s lying to herself. He’d found her, she’d given up her search and it had clawed her insides every day after. It was at a campground in the middle of nowhere Kansas, it had been dark and she had the Winnebago’s windows open, he crept in like a shadow. When she saw him there’d been too much to feel and not enough left to care.  

 

“I didn’t do it for me,” he’d said. “We’re even now.”

 

“How?”

 

“You tried to save me, so I saved you.” He'd been very emotionless about the whole thing.

 

“It’s not like you baptized me.”

 

“Stop acting holy, Kate. Things like that don’t exist for us anymore.”

 

“Scott, I’m afraid.”

 

“It’s because you need to eat.”

 

She’d said nothing, he’d known she would refuse.

 

Even when he brought it straight from the blood bank the next day, she turned him away.

 

He broke things and left in anger after telling her she was still the same spoiled Christian girl she’s always been.

 

After a few months he came back, again. When he did it was with a briefcase full of cash, a passport with a new name and Ranger Gonzalez’s number. “Carlos doesn’t know what I did, he’ll want you dead when he figures it out. Please, stay quiet.”

 

“Why won’t you come with me?”

 

“We’re not kids anymore, Kate.”

 

And so she continues with her life of emptiness.

 

* * *

 

When he dreams it's about his brother, their father, the sufferances they were given in childhood.

 

He hears Santanico whisper to him from empty corridors, when he calls for her she does not respond because the name she gave him was never in trust, she would've told him the truth if it had been. The snake of her soul crawls up his throat and he vomits it into dead, brittle grass, he's outside of a house he's never seen before, the last name printed on the mailbox seems like a distant memory.

 

He rings the doorbell and it's a monster's face that answers, Kate's face but he can't quite recall all the details, it's been years and she looks fuzzy in his mind, he remembers the softness of her skin and the smell of her hair but he can't touch to see if she's still anything like she used to be.

 

"I'll never forgive you," she says, and shuts the door in his face.

 

* * *

 

She cannot run forever.

 

Everywhere she turns are temptations, pretty girls and stoic boys, each have their own scent, like walking past a pandaria and smelling something fresh inside, she’s dying for even a taste. There’s a close call in Montpelier, a girl her age who walks too close, she’s just come from an apartment up the lane. There must have been a boy there. Kate can smell what they’ve just done, eyes attuned to the rip in the girl’s tights, the hickey on her neck, it makes her crave more, pheromones mixed with oxygen and amino acids. She feels her fangs drop, there’s a rush of adrenaline and the call for blood, she drags the girl into darkness, covers her mouth so she cannot scream.

 

“Please.” It’s muffled around her hand, but Kate can hear it, she can see it in the girl’s eyes right before she sinks her teeth into the carotid, she feels feral, she cannot stop herself, she prays quietly and her hand slips, the girl sobs into the night and God has mercy, Kate is gone like a whisper, she cannot run forever, she has to live with it, she has to _hide_.

 

She calls Ranger Gonzalez.

 

“If I tell you where I am will you come?”

 

“Where are you?”

 

“I want to go home.”

 

“Just tell me where you are Kate.”

 

She wants to tell him she doesn’t want to die. That she doesn’t want to be treated the way she and Freddie treated Scott when they found him starved and half-wild in his hunger.

 

She tells him and in six hours he’s come, she sits in the dark of a hotel room off a sleepy main street in a town with a mexican-american portmanteau name.

 

“Kate, you don’t look so good.” He has a stake under the fall of his coat.

 

“I didn’t feed last night even when I could have, I’m not going to bite you, but you can put a muzzle on me if it makes you feel safer.”

 

He does and she doesn’t hold it against him.

 

* * *

 

Somehow the story always circles back to the beginning. She goes back to the place she shouldn’t, trying to hide in plain sight. Bethel has become a ghost town, home of the elderly and the stuck. When her daddy left the church the flock lost its shepherd, most of the houses sit abandoned with weathered ‘For Sale’ signs in the overgrown front yards.

 

The Fuller house is untouched, she finds the key under the back mat and lets herself in, there’s still blood on the floor from last time, from her brother, she supposes she’ll add to the mess. Freddie led her here and trusted her to be alone, but for a moment she wonders if he should’ve.

 

“If you need me, call me,” he said when they pulled up to the curb, she asked him specifically not to come inside with her because she isn’t ready for history to repeat itself.

 

She hugged him, and when he flinched it felt worse than if he’d staked her; he took the muzzle off nonethe same and waved at her as he drove away.

 

For a moment she wishes she could call Scott, could ask if he remembers where their mother kept the extra bleach because the bottle in the laundry room is empty. But he’s busy, he has things more important than her idle wonders. He isn’t hiding, he’s fighting, she feels ashamed for wanting to ask him to come home so she doesn’t have to be alone, to turn his face from the world and its evils. She’s one of the same evils now and it’s still hard to think of herself as one of them, the hatred she has for what she’s become eats at her more than the hunger most days.

 

When she goes to the nearest home store to buy supplies, people don’t look at her. It’s strange, they should know better, like all the others. But here she blends in as she loads the cart with paper towels, bleach, dish soap, garden supplies.

 

The clerk at check-out is her age, the age she’ll forever be.

 

He smiles brightly at her, honey skin and black hair. He looks like Rafa, that makes a part of her hurt. She looks down at the floor as he rings her up, pays the total and takes her bags quietly, no hello or goodbye.

 

Life begins to have some approximation of old habits. The laundry detergent she buys is the same one her mother always used. She looks out the front windows like her father used to do in a different place, a different house. She eats while sitting on top of the counter the way Scott would, no matter how many times he was told not to, but when she spills red gristle and goo on the fake marble there’s no one there to tell her to clean it up.

 

Another year passes in slow motion.

 

Earthquakes, wildfire, mass slayings of students, tour groups, missionary efforts all rattle around below the border, she watches it on the news while feeding from stray cats.

 

She’s promised not to go to Mexico. She promises because Freddie knows she’ll never _swear_ to anything even after she’s forgone church for months and hasn’t knelt before bed to pray in almost a week.

 

She wonders if he’ll come after her if she leaves Bethel, if he still watches her home, he doesn’t, he should maybe, she decides. She remembers the way he flinched the last time they touched, how far away he sounds over the phone. There’s something inky and awful that seethes and crawls the walls of her insides, the chambers of her heart that beat the same as they always have, something hates him.

 

She is getting hungrier every day, it hurts, she cries. She can’t tell him, or Scott, not from fear but from spite.

 

She is alone, no one’s come to save her. No one’s come to make things any better.

 

* * *

 

They argue. They are always arguing now.

 

“Don’t give me your arbitrary bullshit. You whine, you mope, you lose the fight and then you go off and suck two liters of A negative.”

 

“You know what’s not arbitrary, Seth? Money. It has value because you can compare any amount of it to anything else and have a tangible more than or less than value. It’s a common denominator. Except, you can't count for shit. How hard is it to keep a ledger? The numbers are fucking _wrong_.”

 

“The boxes in the book are too small.”

 

“What?” He pauses in his frantic pacing.

 

Seth says nothing, he looks at the ledger blankly.

 

Richie startles with complete understanding of the problem. “Holy shit.”

 

“What?”

 

“You need glasses.”

 

Seth blows out air, “Fuck off.”

 

“Fine, read this.”

 

Richie flashes him a piece of paper he's marked with a sixty point text size word Seth can only half make out. The curves of the letters wiggle and strain his vision.

 

“You know my Spanish is shit.”

 

“It’s not Spanish," Richie sighs. "It's _c_ _ocksucker_ backwards.”

 

* * *

 

She begins to collect things like a magpie. Scraps of glass she finds around the property, cow tags, missing earrings, bullet casings. Stows them in a box on the mantle, keepsakes of a world she misses during the day when she’s sleeping.

 

Her mother’s cross is tucked in there, too. One of Scott’s Lucha Libre magazines, her’s father’s favorite cuff links, a broken shard of glass from the China vase in the kitchen, shoelaces from the boots she wore in Mexico.

 

She has a missing button she picked off of one of Seth’s shirts when he let her sleep in it sometimes, a torn polaroid taken of them outside some truck stop, an old woman wanted to take their picture but gave it back to them. Seth had rolled his eyes but Kate, she’s always been more sentimental.

 

At least she used to be. Now when she looks at all the things she keeps from when she was alive every part of her is numb. She wonders if venom kills a person’s empathy, compassion, ambition, their _pride_. She wonders if it replaces everything that used to be with tired regret.

 

She’s taken up a smoking habit. Idle way to pass the time, her lungs still burn like when she was human, but it doesn’t taste like death so much as chemicals, menthol, cat piss. She gets Richie’s brand, only the green box kind she likes the sting of peppermint.

 

When she’s going stir-crazy she stands on the porch and smokes, has a jar full of pennies and throws them at crows that gather around her, a force that hits them like a bullet, instant death. They land on the porch with wet _plops_ like damp washcloths.

 

The radio plays pop country from inside the house, it makes her head hurt. She smokes a whole pack in one sitting, picking at the peeling paint on the rail until it splinters.

 

Sometimes the boredom is worse than the hunger, because boredom isn’t easy to satiate.

 

Scott visits to make sure she’s alive, he won’t tell her what he’s doing, what _Carlos_ is doing. Neither will Freddie during their weekly calls. She hasn’t heard anything about the Geckos or Santanico or Malvado or the Lords. Life is quiet and she feels her mind deteriorate with hunger, she has to eat more animals than before just to keep herself from straying, from getting too close to having an accident again.

 

* * *

 

 

Some days she loses track of herself entirely, she doesn't know if it's the hunger or the loneliness.

 

* * *

 

She’s like her grandmother was in retirement. The cereal box she stole from the neighbor’s trash is empty, she shreds the cardboard and writes her address on the send-away for a free Kellogg's collectable bowl and spoon.

 

The stray cat she found under the deck outside threads between her ankles under the kitchen table. It trusts her. She writes out a five dollar check and puts the box tops in a ziploc bag before reaching down to ruffle behind its ears. She holds it carefully, cradles it up next to her mouth, it’s never gotten easy betraying blind faith.

 

She’s not fast enough, it hears her fangs drop, there are scratches on her face and across the kitchen where she’s thrown the vicious stray into the wall so hard its spine has shattered.

 

When she gives it her venom it dies, writhing violently.

 

She buries it after she’s eaten its insides.

 

The phone is ringing when she comes back inside with dirt on her hands and fur between her teeth.

 

“Kate…” It’s Freddie, and she knows from his tone what he’s going to say to her. “I’m so sorry, Kate.”

 

One minute her brother is there and the next he’s not. He'd just been by the week before, tried to convince her to eat and it turned into a fight as always, but before he left he told her he loved her for the first time in years. She wonders if he knew what was going to happen, and she hates him for it if he did.

 

Freddie says he lost touch with him somewhere past Guatemala, went to check and found nothing but dust and clothes. It could have been the Lord's or Carlos' leftovers. Freddie isn’t sure, but there’s Scott’s pocket knife and the sparrow skull keychain Kate made him for Christmas, she doesn't stay on the line to hear any other suspicions.

 

For a week she sits in the living room recliner and does not stir, stares at the peeling wallpaper, she doesn't even cry.

 

When she decides to move again there’s more dead birds on the porch, she kicks them away from the front steps in case Scott’s ghost wants to come inside.

 

* * *

 

Another year passes in quiet sorrow, she begins to lose track of days, her insides are hollow and her face is gaunt, she visits the church her daddy used to preach in at night when it’s vacant, they’ve converted it to Catholicism, she lights a candle and lays out on the pews under the stained glass night and dreams.

 

 _He_ blows out a prayer candle she’s just lit, “You ever think you’re the disillusioned one?” She knows he’s talking about how she’s done nothing but play the victim since the beginning of her afterlife, she thinks he’s the one full of shit for trying to call her out about it.

 

“You ever notice how people try to justify things they feel guilty over by trying to find the same things done wrong in the behavior of another person, so their actions are vindicated?” She answers.

 

So many words, they tumble out easier, in here, than they ever would in any true church with Sunday morning shining through the stained glass.

 

“I don’t feel guilty.”

 

“Yeah, how can you feel anything once you’re dead?” It’s a rhetorical question, she knows the answer.

 

Richie is there again, in her orbit, it’s been years; he’s a solid body, monster movie face, against her back, just a few moments, pressed forward against the back of the pew, the scrape of his mouth under the fall of her hair and she almost screams, she’s always been afraid, and it hurt worse than she thought it would, venom corroding and seizing up her heart, burn and blackness.

 

And then he is gone, gone somewhere to wake-up, out of her head.

 

She lights another candle and sits down and wipes away the smear of red on her neck, rubs the red stain off between her fingers, it collects in lines under her nails. Her ears ring and when she sniffles she tastes blood.

 

* * *

 

Ranger Gonzalez still calls once a month, asks her how she is.

 

There are so many awful things no one ever knows about, she can almost hear him say, in between the words he manages to say out loud. He’s still working, he still hears things, sees things, he’s following a road with no name to a place no good or whole man wants to walk down.

 

He always has been. She knows this. _No one is ever happy knowing_ , she tells him.

 

He asks her how she forgets, as if she’s an adult with more weighted wisdom than he has. It’s a hard conversation made harder by speaking over the phone, there’s no connection, she feels strange and every word no more important than ones off of a box of cereal or the instructions of how to put batteries in a television remote.

 

 _When things change we need to make peace that maybe we have too and things will never be the same again_.

 

Billy sounds off like a squall in another layer of sound beyond the voice in her ear, they say goodbye and she feels very lonely.

 

She realizes after the child crying must be a different one, Billy is seven...eight?

 

Her memories slip from her hands. She’s never felt more young, never felt so tired. There’s resentment inside she can’t face, she corrects herself, tries for patience, then for peace.

 

* * *

 

He’s been working for the Lords to watch the worst of the unaccountable souls; Santanico, the Geckos. He keeps tabs and surveils. Freddie knows she didn’t ask for this, he knows she never wanted it, he calls at least once a month but she always sounds far away, and then farther still.

 

He wants to ask if she’s been feeding but the long trails between one word and the next answer the question she’s too tired to talk about.

 

Freddie knows he should be proud, should tell her so but she’s starving and really starving is the same as dying. He doesn’t say anything about how much he wished she didn’t hurt so much. She always hangs up first.

 

It was never his fault but he still feels like he failed her because he failed her brother, who's gone now too. They were good kids, this shouldn’t have been their life.

 

* * *

 

“You’re getting old.”

 

“What’s it to you?”

 

“Almost over the hill, you should have a big party. With hats.”

 

Seth rolls his eyes, he’s sorting through electric bills and shredding all the rest. “I’ll keep that in mind.” There’s more gray than black in his hair at this point, he has reading glasses perched at the edge of his nose.

 

Richie takes a long drag from his cigarette, he’s sure he’d need a new set of lungs if he were still human. “You think you’d be dead by now, if we retired in El Rey?”

 

“Probably.”

 

“Sometimes I think you wish you were. I think you wish I was dead too.”

 

His silence answers.

 

“Maybe we should take a break for awhile.”

 

“Let me guess, it’s not me, it’s you?”

 

He’s been thinking about it for the past few years, when he came back he knew there would be another breaking point, heroes are never good at working in teams, especially if they share blood. It’s a common occurrence amongst most stories, he’s settled himself to the numb reality that Seth does not have a grasp of forever and shouldn’t be hanging on an immortal’s coattails the rest of his life, it’s only going to kill him faster.

 

“You know, I should be mad,” Seth says, he shreds another letter. “But I’ve gotten over it.”

 

“Age brings wisdom.”

 

“Will you at least fucking call me sometimes?”

 

“I’ll send post cards.”

 

“Don’t be a faggot.”

 

He smirks, for a moment he isn’t sure if he can actually leave, his love for Seth is less of a weakness and more of a condition, maybe that’s part of being brothers and he’ll never get past it, even when Seth is long gone.

 

“It isn’t forever.”

 

Seth snorts and turns away to stare at his computer screen. “Only until my funeral.”

 

If he walks away without looking he can convince himself that this is less of a departure; having no expiration date makes it easier to live in denial and he won’t spare himself the luxury, he knows Seth won’t wait around until he comes back this time, it’s exactly what he’s hoping for.

 

“Richie.” Seth says it before he can get to the door, hand on the knob, the lock creaks. “Don’t go to her.”

 

“I don’t even know where Santanico is.” He won’t turn back around and face the truth, he doesn’t want their last interaction to be an argument.

 

“You know she’s not who I’m talking about.”

 

He shuts the door quietly behind him as he leaves.

 

* * *

 

The girls gather around him, he’s a dark star gravity well, warping, pulling, and they like his suit, his fake glasses, and the bible in his hands that he’s never read.

 

She frowns, turns her head and knows he’ll be back.

 

She’s dreaming, a long night of waking and falling back into the incongruent soup of daytime trivialities and weekly worries, into the deeply rooted primordial fears of falling, bleeding, and being stuck, unable to move.

 

The night she is sleeping through is a dream.

 

Waking up is hard, her heart beats so fast, and the exactitude of the relationship between fear and her chest being tapped from the inside like a drumskin, a pen against an unsupported piece of paper, is surprising, dimly in sleepy movements she puts her hand under her shirt, feels her breast jump.

 

It won’t slow and she is scared, it is the black-blue bruise of predawn star-fade, she says it’s not dark out, out loud, wonders why she was so afraid.

 

She’s dreaming of dawn not yet arrived.

 

When she really wakes the sun has gone down and the bed holds no warmth.

 

She is very hungry.

 

He stands in the dark corner of her room and waits, he offers her his throat.

 

She wakes up for real, his blood is like a memory in her mouth.

 

* * *

 

He wanders for a few years, not many, but enough.

 

He dreams.

 

There is the intangible force of fate.

 

He sees it roll over her like a wave, it batters and moves her, an arm sweeping everything away from the table top, the chessboard, the backhand across a smart mouth or the quick pistol whip in the bank lobby, it’s there to rock her, heavy and debilitating and the undertow catching on all limbs.

 

He sees it in a girl. The girl is Kate and then it’s Kisa.

 

In the woman he thought was his once there’s nothing rolling over. Her fate was the mayan doomsday meteor taking out everything that she was, name and memory and priestess, loved and cradled and kept in white linen and gold on dusty altars in his dream there is no blood and there are no chains.

 

He can’t understand, not even after she’s tossed him around and he’s tossed around words that don’t erase reality. He’s dreaming of a fight they always had.

 

A girl who is Kisa who becomes Santanico tells him that logic is no companion for fury. Time and a long wait take away the first impulse, the first feeling but after tht _want_ ferments _fury_ , the sharp clean finish of a dinner pairing or the richness of a dessert.

 

And he’s given up the fight because it might cost him something tangible: “Wait! The car! The car.” “I want him dead! I want his whole world turned to dust. No more slavery. Richard. Does your brilliant fucking mind understand that?”

 

He’d heard her but was unable to make sense of anything with her holding his body, a veritable wrecking ball before the halted momentum, suspended above the hood of the Camaro.

 

It happens again. He got that she was angry, but he never fully understood why it mattered more to her than being set, forever.

 

Revenge went beyond a long con. He squirted lighter fluid on his sleeping father for a black eye that made his left eye worse than his right the night after the school nurse got to the letter ‘G’ on the Snellen chart roster.

 

He always had better things to plot with his time than doing something to a person. People were easy, bang, dead. If he really wanted it. Simple and done.

 

In his dream he’s the one who walks away from a woman he still called Santanico then, really he drives away. Kate is sitting next to him in the passenger seat, he turns to look at her and she’s all yellow eyes and fangs, when she sinks them into his neck the car crashes.

 

He wakes up and turns the key in the ignition, it’s been years since he’s had any direction as to where to go.

 

He thinks maybe he should’ve just gone to her in the first place, it would’ve made sense. He’s come to realize his own co-dependency in the past few years without his brother or Santanico, he doesn’t do good when he’s alone. They used to slap a bunch of words on it when he was a kid, they wanted to give him medicine, uppers and downers, he thinks that immortality may have made him more stable within his own company, but it’s not like he’s doing well for himself on his own. He needs to shave again, it’s becoming a real problem, the other week he found himself talking to no one in particular, there’s a lot of thoughts in his head he can’t get out. Most Seth would call him an idiot for having, but Seth turns forty-two soon and has a prescription for eyeglasses and refuses to admit he’s losing the high frequency range of his hearing.

 

Richie remembers Kate being nicer, being compassionate despite her no bullshit attitude. At least she _listened_. She’s not getting old either, he won’t have to watch her die.

 

* * *

 

By the time he makes it to Bethel it’s the ten year reunion of the their first meeting next to the over-chlorinated pool of a cheap motel only eighty miles from a border crossing.

 

He notices dead crows on the porch corner, stinking and rotting even after the sun has disappeared. There’s sparrow bones in their burst bellies, shiny things, bits of copper. He suddenly wishes he would have brought her something, like lilacs, bits of ribbon, sea glass in a mason jar. He knows she hears him rattling around out here.

 

And he’s shown up, rung the doorbell, moved past the lurking in an impossible not to notice souped up monstrosity of a motor vehicle. He thinks he’s been subtle, she thinks about how easy it was for him to find her. Classic movie plot, the person who’s supposed to be dead runs back to the last place they think someone will look, the same place all their stuff still is.  

 

His misplaced bulk on the front porch, she can tell it’s him, she’s dreamed about him driving at night listening to bad eighties synth-rock, she doesn’t answer.

 

Ten minutes later she can see him through the lace curtain hanging on the back kitchen door. He waits, and finally she opens it.

 

For an eerie minute, neither of them say anything, she expects him to fill the space with words but he doesn't, the cicadas hum in the trees and she's aware of the way he's looking at her with that quiet intensity of his, like she cannot hide a single, damn thing from him.

 

There’s something she’s forgotten, an important point of discussion: Richie was never spooled as tightly as Seth. Before Satanico, before Mexico, snags and whispered hisses of conversations between brothers come back to her. Richie has never been the same sort of sane as everyone else.

 

“You look sick.”

 

He doesn’t go on to point out her pallor, or the splotchy skin and the sunkenness of starvation, “Yeah, I think I might puke.” He stinks like a charnel house and she’s more sensitive to the smell of it.

 

He doesn’t extend a hand, “You should go somewhere, take a trip.”

 

And she doesn’t walk out to his car, “Oh, yeah?”

 

It’s not going to be like that, those aren’t the roles they’re going to play, he’s not going to save her from her slow decay and she’s not going to believe the lie he might tell her about him being able to. She has always pegged Richie Gecko as a false prophet.

 

“You should listen to me.”

 

“Because you know how to make good life choices?”

 

“I do.”

 

“You should go,” she pushes the door back to the way it was, shut and hiding his face from her, “sunrise is at seven-thirty-seven this morning.”

 

Jesus is staring at her from a picture magnet on the refrigerator door, hands out, palms up, waiting for her supplication.

 

“I’m not leaving,” he says, like this is a game. She supposes, for him, it is.

 

He sits down in a chair on the back patio for the hour before sunrise, and she doesn’t see him again until the next night, he’s in the same place, smoking a cigarette with a book about ancient eroticism open in his lap, waiting for the flood.

 

* * *

 

Over the next few nights she notices the dead birds have been cleaned off the porch, the weeds have been pulled and there's new mulch in the flowerbeds.

 

It takes almost a full month, several books and the restoration of the outside of the house, but eventually she lets him in. She’s scared of holding on to spite for so long that he leaves for good. She’s been so lonely the past decade, and though she hates him, he knows her.

 

“Finally let the boogeyman out from under the bed, huh?” he steps past her inside when she holds the back door open, she notices his latest read is about manhunters from the Pacific Islands.

 

“You act like I’m not a monster, too.” She looks hollow, empty, years of loneliness have dug her out. He imagines her lungs are somewhere behind her guts, all twisted up inside, tendons cutting into her throat. It sounds like she hasn’t talked in years, like there is dust behind her words, a book that hasn’t been open for awhile, one nobody cared to take off the shelf and read.

 

“You changed your hair,” he says, softly.

 

She nods, touches the new length of the bob. “It makes me look older.”

 

“How long have you been seventeen now, ten, eleven years?”

 

She corrects him. "Eighteen, I was eighteen."

 

* * *

 

She made the move into her parents’ old bedroom a few years ago, likes the space of the queen mattress better than a twin. She gives him her old room, the shelves collecting dust. Scott’s bedroom is off limits. She wonders if he will even stay the night now that she’s given him what he wanted, is surprised to see him at the kitchen table the next evening.

 

Her exhaustion and edging exasperation is plain in her tired eyes, her end of the day slumped set of shoulder, “You’re still here?”

 

“You never finished saying the things you wanted to, actually you died before you go to tell me everything.”

 

“What things.”

 

“About losing your faith. How it was my fault. I could hear you whispering it sometimes. I could hear you praying, you stopped.”

 

“Trusting someone takes faith, takes belief.”

 

“You lost it at the Twister.”

 

“Not even then,” there’s something like pride in her tone, “after the Twister.”

 

“With Seth.”

 

“He didn’t understand that what he was doing would kill him, eventually. How horrible that would have been, it bothered me that there would be no reconciliation between you two, just an entire life left to the side, stepped over. I felt that again when I came back to Bethel, saw the mailbox filled up with birthday cards and bills and pennysavers addressed to my dead parents and Scott. I lost my faith in people before I saw Scott again after I had said things to him to make him believe his life meant more before he became something else, and when he ran away out the back door when I wasn’t looking and killed some more there was nothing for me. No pain, no wounds, no real sense of loss. It was  just like exhaling, it was done, my family, all gone. And it was okay.” She says all of this very quietly while filling a coffee mug full of pig’s blood.

 

He sniffs, his mouth sets in a sneer but his tone is not malicious. “Your god is ambivalent, Kate.”

 

“All he hears is our screams, sometimes it’s all we do. Praise and gratitude are difficult when we are unable to find our own happiness. But, maybe I’m just a girl who’s got major daddy issues, Richard. I’m just trying to find a little happiness.”

 

He thinks of the last time he was happy. Before Seth got pinched for that solo job. He wonders if Kate knows she’s not just lying to him when she speaks.

 

"You really do look like shit. You aren't feeding, are you?"

 

She does not answer him, he expected as much.

 

“What have you been sustaining yourself on, then?” he asks.

 

“Butcher's leftovers, stray cats, cows.”

 

“ _Cows_?”

 

“I’ve always liked beef,” she says nonchalantly.

 

“Here I pegged you for more of a vegetarian." He takes a long leisurely look at her, that kind of gaze of his that’s always unsettled her, like she’s being watched under a microscope, acutely aware of every part of her body his eyes see.

 

She shakes her head, mute, refuting-- he’s always had an easy way of doing this to her, like morphine or dope or pills. His hands look blue in the kitchen light, his glasses shine his eyes.

 

“You know, if you’re ever peckish for a snack, I’ve got some one-hundred percent American sirloin right here,” he says, patting at his lap.

 

Kate blinks,  “Does it come with fries?” Even she can hear Seth speaking.

 

“And a milkshake if you’re lucky.”

  
She’s heard enough blowjob jokes between him and his brother to compensate for her lifetime of PG-13, pastor approved dinner table humor that she remembers. Instead of dignifying him with a response, she goes back to her room and doesn't come out for a couple of days.

 

* * *

 

For months they sit on an interim of silence, she doesn’t say much to him, he thinks she’s still too busy hating what they both are, especially herself for letting him inside. She still has not forgiven him.

 

Sometimes, when she’s especially lonely, she asks him about Santanico.

 

“She understood. Simple human connection was always hard, she knew that. We drove off and she changed. “

 

“Understanding someone doesn’t mean you’re connected, it doesn’t even mean they care.”

 

“You don’t know shit about her or about me.”

 

“Whatever connection you think was there, wasn’t. She probably understood you, but you can learn that. You couldn’t connect to her either though, there was nothing you had before you met her or before she insinuated herself into that big brain that was in her too, a core value like a bone you need, a ribcage. Like something alchemical that was in your matter.”

 

Sometimes he wishes she never would’ve asked him, others he’s thankful she’s past lying.

 

* * *

 

She sleeps in her parents’ bed and during daylight hours he stalks the shady corners of the kitchen and her bedroom that only starts to receive sunset rays after he’s already awake. It smells like something sweet and the salt of adolescent girl after midnight, there's a light on in the bathroom between her and Scott’s old bedroom, it glows under the door and he can see a blood stain on the sheets, it's small, almost unnoticeable, he wonders where it came from. If it was a wound or something more primal, did she bleed in this bed when she became a woman, did she have fever dreams of him even then?

 

There’s the scent of her on the flowered fabric years after she’s slept here. There's baptismal keepsakes on the shelves, a Precious Moments cross above the headboard, stuffed animals glare at him with glass eyes from the windowsill.

 

He presses himself with abortive thrusts against the mattress that’s more springs than softness, it squeaks, he likes the thrill of the sound, the idea of fucking her down into the frame, it isn’t tangible enough to get him there.

 

Her clothes still sit in the drawers of her bleached wood and wicker furniture set. He thinks of her wearing them in church, he thinks of her wearing them without anything underneath, he wonders if she’ll ever wear them again. He wonders if he can steal a pair of panties without her noticing.

 

Her least favorite pairs are a tumble in their designated drawer, he examines the disarray while smoking a cigarette, his fingers tripping over each pair, there are a few, maybe too small, maybe too skimpy, maybe too bright for her to have packed in a bag that went with her to Mexico. He ruminates on how they might measure up against the curve of her ass, perkier from all the swims in cheap motel pools and running from gunfire, if the floral cups of discount store lingerie will hold her tits without gouging her with underwire.

 

His fangs drop and venom edges the line of his gums, it hurts but he swallows around his urges.

 

He wonders if Seth ever saw them, what his brother would think spying a little preacher’s girl in plain white panties with a pink bow on the hem, the softness of her thighs milk and honey underneath, did he jerk it at night thinking about it? Did she hear him, did she like it? They spent three months together, he wonders if she ever let Seth touch her, if his big brother really got on his knees and begged for just one little taste of her pussy.

 

He saw the way Seth looked at her, even their first meeting, the small swell of her tits, the shine of her hair, he held her too close in bad situations. Both of them liked how small she was, is, the fragility of her wrists and long lashes. It’s a forever thing now.

 

He wonders if she would've let his brother fuck her had he asked nicely, had he been kinder.

 

Would she have opened up to him like a flower, would Seth have made her cum? Probably, he would've eaten her out for hours if that's what it took, Richie's never been able to deny his brother's devotion.

 

But it’s him and not his brother lying awake with his cock in hand in her old bedroom every day, and Seth is somewhere getting old, he never had the courage to come back for and satiate the need she's instilled in the both of them.

 

There’s a creaking outside the door, she listens sometimes, between awareness and the pain of self-imposed starvation, she’ still just a girl, she’s still curious about boys, about men, about him.

  
She’s still curious about all the things she never felt while she was still alive. He wonders if she would open the door and slip in between her old sheets if he bled out her name on a groan. He never does though, he’s silent aside muted hisses and grunts, she usually walks away before he cums.

 

They never talk about it and he's okay with that, for now.

 

* * *

 

When they fight it’s worse than any of the ones he ever had with Seth. She doesn’t yell, she barely looks at him, she doesn’t need to say much to cut his body away from his bones.

 

“Why do you think Christians marry other Christians, the right ones who worship the right way. It’s because faith _makes_ a person, they don’t just understand, they have the same _God_. It’s what all the blood is about. You need someone to share your God with Kate? You holding out for that? Someone who’s got a bone for you that says Jesus on it?”

 

“Santanico left because she was disappointed, there wasn’t anything she wanted after she finished what she needed to. She left because the only God you have is money and only the sermon you’re selling is about how much you deserve to be a king. Santanico left  because you love having things, and for most of her life that’s all she was. A thing. Even to you, the man she bared her soul to and let swallow whole. Do you still keep the snake inside your belly, Richard?”

 

It happens quick, he’s in her space, pinning her against the wall that separates the living room from the front porch, she hears crows screeching outside, there’s only a breath between them. He says nothing else about her eating habits, he knows she wants to rot and he’s let her so far, she wonders if it’s because it makes it easier to hold her down.

 

“You act like you’re a savior though you’re poisoned like me, how does it feel to have fallen so far from grace?”

 

She holds his gaze, he knows she would be happy if her killed her right here and left her to deteriorate like her nostalgia filled house, the crypt she keeps for her own misery like an undead Miss. Havisham. “I asked you to set me free, once,” she says. “It wasn’t me exactly, but I remember it.”

 

“I won’t end you, Kate. Who would keep me company if I did?”

 

“Just because you don’t want to watch him die doesn’t mean you should’ve just abandoned your brother again. You’re going to regret it, like you did the last time. You’d think you’d have learned from your mistakes by now and stop being a Cain wannabe.”

 

“I think you have your stories mixed up, the lack of blood is going to your head.”

 

She reaches up and grabs tightly to his wrist, if he were human the bones would turn to dust, as it stands she can only draw blood with the edge of her thumbnail. “Say that when Seth is dead.”

 

“I’m not the only one who abandoned him.”

 

“He was never my responsibility and I was never his. I’m not yours either.”

 

He softens then, loosens his hold, she eases back into the wall and plaster shakes down from the ceiling, his hands feel like feathers against her skin, she thinks he smells like grave soil and long forgotten sunlight. “I didn’t come here because I felt responsible for you.”

 

“Then why?”

 

When he turns away from her she feels cold without his touch, it’s the first time she’s felt anything in a long while. “I don’t know,” he shrugs. “It’s like kismet.”

 

Eventually they learn to live with each other.

 

 

 

 

 


	2. Lady Macbeth

Her grandmother watched Jeopardy nightly, Kate remembers weekends at her house in Waco, falling asleep to the ratcheting around of the Wheel of Fortune after the champion was announced.

 

In the surreal actuality of a dream Kate stands at the very center of a courtyard featured in a decade ago in a Daily Double.

 

Her brother is with her. They walk side by side. The tour guides don’t talk about the lords of the night, but it is in the brochure she wishes she could fold it and put it in her suit pocket because she’ll wish she had it to refer to later. There’s no mention of the vision serpent or trickster heroes. There’s no catabasis, no journey, no start of the world or end of all things, there’s just jungle heat and green and the warm uneven temple stone.

 

Only, it isn’t her dream.

 

Seth is silent next to her and her brother is dead. Scott is dead.

 

Someone else who remembers sun is dreaming too, someone standing alone at night pretending to see the day and its inhabitants.

 

The dream of someone who sees things.

* * *

 

She sleeps long past sunset.

 

Sometimes he stands in the hall and listens to the sounds she makes when she’s asleep. It doesn’t worry him until she sleeps through a night and wakes during the afternoon.

 

He’s only just gone to bed when he hears her a floor below, her groggy irritation and her sharp hiss when she opens a door and finds the hallway flooded with noontime sun.

 

It’s only partly his own fatigue that keeps him from going down the stairs and knocking. He listens to the restless shuffling of her feet across the wood floor below and wishes she would let him bring her back to bed if he did knock.

 

She’d make him sleep on top of the covers but he’d still be in her bed, her parents’ bed. He’d touch her hair and watch the shapes her mouth would make when she sleeps.

 

He doesn’t move from his own borrowed bed, he falls asleep listening to her helpless stumblings around the floor below.

 

* * *

 

She thinks of how he still has a snake in his belly, and how that, for as long as it’s in there Santanico will always be alive. He’ll be her keeper until the end of time or until both him and she die.

 

She thinks about Santanico and some part of her is jealous. He stands in her kitchen and waits, pleased and patient, like he knows where her thoughts lie.

 

She can’t remember why he looks so smug, she thinks they might have had an argument or that he was right about something but it’s slipped from her mind so readily it’s as if it wasn’t there.

 

She thinks about Celestino and Malvado. Seth and Richie. Her and Scott.

 

There are clear cut distinctions, but everyone changes. She thinks maybe Scott would have changed, she’s changed. She’s gone rotten.

 

Seth and Richie, equal and opposite in how they destroy, themselves instead of others, the world instead of the bad guys. Celestino tricked a thousand souls into satiating the hunger he felt, reformed later into pulp fiction novelist. Malvado wasn’t who made Santanico more monster than girl, he just kept her that way for a thousand years.

 

When she stood in front of him she’d known Malvado wasn’t the devil. _What was there to be afraid of_ , was what she wanted to say, what she wanted to truly to feel.

 

She had been so acutely aware of danger that death, as clear as it was in that moment, was an anathema to everything.

 

Even complete faith couldn’t dispel the doubt.

 

There may have been time for some small utterance or to try to pull her wrist from that tight fingered hand that was heavier with it’s silver and rings.

 

There may have pain, chilly, and razor sharp and warmth spilling before it was leeched from all her limbs and her heart and finally left to spurt and dribble out on the floor around someone’s snakeskin boots.

 

Malvado hadn’t been the devil, he’d been too selfish, too motivated by business to be the rival of all time for the benevolent god.

 

“The devil’s an undoing, of everything.”  She says, standing in her kitchen, after she’s said a lot of other things she can’t remember because pain rolls around in her vitals, like she’s dying, like she’s been shot, her face doesn’t show anything.

 

It passes. Like always. She’s never really let it heal all the way.

 

There’s a slug moving slowly along her digestive tract, reabsorbed after rupturing her insides so many times it’s like a stuffed animal on her still made bed, deserving of a name. A name on a bullet.

 

Malvado, she thinks,  just believed his own hype. Another bad guy wanting to create the world in the their own image.

 

“The devil doesn’t have a kingdom, he has Hell.” She tells the man in her kitchen.

 

“You think you know what Hell looks like?”  Richie smiles.

 

She told him to go there once.

 

The bullet in her belly moves like the snake in his, slowly. She feels it. He feels it.

 

* * *

 

Sometimes when she’s sitting alone munching on tasteless raw hamburger or sipping at a cup of pig’s blood, Richie off somewhere finding his own meal that she doesn't let herself think about it, she misses Seth.

 

He was so acutely different from his brother. His guilt and violence and empty hands. She could fit to the shape of him like a missing limb, and he held her steady in the best way he knew how.

 

She wonders if she could have ever loved him, there were traces of it under her broken heart. He was all she had. It was a blip on her timeline, but it was still _there_ . They were _partners_ , and Seth smelled like gunpowder, sandalwood, fresh dollar bills and motel soap. She always liked that, liked the scruff on his cheek that would rub her fingers raw when she touched him.

 

Seth was a wildfire, but Richie is calmer. More subtle. Seth set her ablaze. Richie has always made her melt, his collar neat, his eyes open.

 

With Seth all she could ever do was need, but with Richie, she _wants_.

 

All the time on the open road, dust and heatwave, cactuses and once or twice an upper out of Seth’s overnight snack bag when everything felt too dangerous to sleep safely, she’d think. Think about things she wanted. The superficial and sinful. The shameful. She’s ashamed less and less with each passing day.

 

He comes back when it’s pitch black outside, there are only candles, the electricity bill still hasn’t been paid. He smells like blood and cologne, but underneath there’s estrogen leaking out of his pores, and she asks him if he’s happy hurting people for a living.

 

“She was just a junkie,” he says, for a moment Kate totters, does it matter anyway, does it matter when she’s so very hungry his proximity makes her salivate.

 

“She still had a life, Richie.”

 

He steps a little closer, holds her gaze. “Your fangs are out,” he flicks at her teeth with his finger, catches the point and tears away skin as he retreats, she’s starving, she wants; tries not to sink her teeth into him.

 

* * *

 

She stands at the window like a true shut-in. It’s only dusk but she’d burn. Outside, Richie talks to a man in a brightly colored cable van, they discuss the difference between wires or a dish on the roof. She can hear him ask about internet and phone and the cable man answers like an infomercial host.

 

When it comes time to sign on the line Richie only reaches out and puts a hand on the man forehead and tells him that he is going to give them free cable and there will be no papers to sign.

 

The van disappears down the street and Richie comes back inside to her curiosity and cocked hip in the entryway. “What was that? It looked illegal.”

 

“It’s my wayob.”

 

She squints at him. “Way-what?”

 

“Every culebra has one, it’s like a special power.”

 

“Like a sailor scout accessory?” She seems downright offended that she’s been discluded.

 

“Not exactly.”

 

“It’s very Mercury Moon Mirror. Where’s mine?”

 

“I don’t know.”

 

“So yours just, what? Gets you whatever you want?”

 

He stares at a rotting spot in the ceiling, he doesn’t like that she makes everything sound so simple and boring. “Yeah, if I touch someone with it.”

 

“That sounds rapey.”

 

He gives her a sharp look over the rim of his glasses. “I only use it for good.”

 

She crosses her arms and peers up at him as if she’s going to tell him off.“Like free cable.”

 

“You said you wanted to watch the Price is Right.”

 

“I wonder if Alex Trebek is dead or if he still hosts Jeopardy,” she ponders, raking a hand through her hair and pulling out a handful.

 

He continues to stare at the ceiling. “Well, now we’ll be able to find out.”

 

* * *

 

“Do you know any words with more than three letters?”

 

She frowns across the tabletop and wooden Scrabble tiles. “I won the school spelling bee in sixth grade. My mom baked me a chocolate cake and had a banner made.”

 

“I stole the bake sale money in the sixth grade and my dad beat my ass.”

 

She sets down tiles and he wonders if she’s joking with the word she’s lain down. “There’s a ‘k’ in ‘knife’,” he tells her, points with his cigarette, ashes fall over the board.

 

Her frown carves down deeper into her cheeks, she sighs, rises and tells him that she’s tired.

 

“You’re hungry, that’s why you can’t focus anymore.”

 

“I’m fine,” she sneers, does not like when he hones in on her weaknesses.

 

“It’s why you keep forgetting things.”

 

“I’m not forgetting things.” Denying, she rearranges the tiles on her placeholder, he gets a double letter score.

 

“What’s your brother’s name?”

 

“Scott.” She answers popping the name like a piece of gum.

 

“What’s my brother’s name?”

 

“Seth.”

 

Her eye roll is weak, at best. She looks up when he lets the silence fall between them for an extra moment, his tone is steady when he asks: “Which one is dead?”

 

Her voice cracks, “Mine.”

 

“Where are your parents?”

 

She pauses, her mouth is a line, there’s a milkiness to her stare and the silence wanders.

 

He focuses in on her, she’s trying not to look at him. “How did you get back here?”

 

Still, she cannot answer.

 

“How many times have I fucked you.”

 

Her gaze is sudden fire, he thinks she’s going to tear his throat out, he hasn’t seen her look so feral before, it happens in an instant and it’s gone, but she’s still scowling. “None. That’s a fucked up question.”

 

“It’d be worse if I told you that you were wrong.”

 

She turns the board over.

 

* * *

 

There’s the aftermath of a tornado that calls for help with the fallout through pleas on the nightly news, she imagines helping pull away debris and sifting through the detritus of someone’s life in a gloomy rustle of similarly dressed do-gooders.

 

God can be violent and angry. But nature does its own terrible work.

 

She sleeps, detached from the vague suffering that shifts around her as the news continues on as background noise. Once, she knows she might have worried herself through an insomniac night, now _day_ , pained because others were aggrieved. She’s changed in a final sort of way, she feels as close to outlaw as she thinks it takes. She is unbothered.

 

Scott is standing in her kitchen and she staggers, she’s going to cry, in the awful and ugly way she does and he looks so sad.

 

Ashamed and guilty. She’d thought she’d let go of all of that.

 

He says he can’t stay for very long, that she won’t be in _any danger or anything_ in the way only a boy can say, unsure if it needs to be mentioned, unsure of themselves, like it’s no big deal, like it’s a common occurrence, his appearance and her tears and the choices they’ve made.

 

“I thought you might be dead. Really dead. And that’s why you never came back.”

 

“I’m not back. I’m just here. So you don’t think I’m _really_ dead.”

 

She cries harder.

 

It’s so casual the way he leaves her behind again, the way he makes the same choice, her chest and head and stomach hurts, she’s hot and angry and all the crying makes her cough.

 

The shape her life has come together and then collapses, it’s her birthday and her brother is dead. She hates him for it and she doesn’t feel badly for it.

 

She’s chafed by it, isolated from joy, in the shade somewhere outside of everyone’s concerns. She goes to a Saturday night service. The sermon is about faith during distress.

 

Scott is dead, his ashes mixing with the dust and heat somewhere down in South America.

 

Richie has to keep reminding her of this, but she never seems to understand, the years are blurring together and she can't tell if she's moving forwards or back.

 

In the parking lot he’s waiting against the door of his ridiculous black car, it’s mob boss sleek and his suit makes him look like an undertaker.

 

“Need a ride?”

 

She gets in and two old women stare at her from two parking spots away. He has the nerve to wave and offer them a sincere sounding “Goodnight.”

 

There’s a scowl securely in place when he slips in on the driver’s side and shifts the car into reverse.

 

“Can we just drive around for awhile?”

 

“The glass is tempered to block ultraviolet, we can watch the sun rise.”

 

“If you want.”

 

He can’t hide the smile cracking open the marble hardness of his face.

 

She falls asleep in the passenger seat, the sun rises and the world turns. He wakes her up with a Shipley Do-Nuts rainbow sprinkle pink frosting monstrosity of sugar.

 

“Happy Birthday, Katie-Cakes.”

 

“Fuck off.”

* * *

 

 

“Your God is not looking out for you.”

 

He doesn’t like rules. Does not understand why anyone should do anything they don’t want to do if they are able to do what they want. Free will. He hasn’t given that up. He wants so badly to adhere to some code, but he translates it into anything tangible, understandable. Like the indelible connections between speech, numbers, written out words, movement and time.

 

He can’t puzzle it out.

 

She can.

 

“God protects.”

 

He looks at her and there’s no shame in what he’s saying, rule breaker boy and heathen that he is. “Well, he’s not doing a very good job.”

 

“When you’re powerful you don’t need a nice sense of humor. God answers selfish prayers and gives you what you think you want for a reason.”

 

She remembers wanting so badly to see him again. Once, when Seth was so strung out, every trip a bad one, she couldn’t cry out her own grief while helping a grown man through his.

 

She remembers later wanting to touch him, be touched by him. Be strong enough to not be changed by it, by anything. It was the dreams, starting it, reminding her that he was still alive, a livewire out in the world she entombed herself apart from.

 

“You’re not a good man, Richie.”

 

“Just figure that out?”

 

She locks the door on him for three days because he’s been trying to get her to drive into the city to feed. He’d force her too, she knows. Her anger and pride is like a second wind.

 

When he’s driven off she feels the fatigue leech through her, the gnawing on her bones. She thinks about the state of things.

 

She’s paid for her life.

 

God has a sense of humor.

 

Richie Gecko got to keep his brother even after he abandoned him, she tried to save hers and Scott’s just desert dust and old ash.

 

* * *

 

She realizes she doesn’t actually know anything about him. Well, she does, what Seth told her anyways. Seth had liked to talk, not when he was nodding off, but when he was wide awake, constant alert.

 

Half the time he cursed Richie, the other he sounded like a proud father, nostalgic for glory days.

 

There’s a radio playing tinny music, they haven’t cleaned the spiderwebs from the corners in months.

 

“What’s your favorite color?” she asks between sips from her thermos, he’s warmed it on the stove for her and brought it back.

 

He looks up from his book, his glasses hang off the edge of his nose, he looks old. “I haven’t thought about it in a while.”

 

“If you had to pick, off the top of your head.”

 

“Jade.”

 

“Why?”

 

“It’s the color of your eyes.”

 

“Very cliche, Richie.”

 

“I like looking at them, it’s familiar now.”

 

She squints. “You have a knack for becoming attached to people, y’know?”

 

He bristles. “Whatever.”

 

His eyes track back up when she takes another sip and swipes at her lips with her tongue. She’s not as hungry lately.

 

“I could always tell you’ve never really wanted to be alone. No one does.”

 

“Could’ve fooled me,” he says. “When I got here you were all but mummified to that chair, and you still turned me away.” He turns a page.

 

“I should’ve kept at it, too. You’re corrupting me.”

 

“It’s not like I’ve gotten you to taste the so called ‘forbidden fruit,’ Virgin Mary.”

 

“Oh, that’s original, come up with it off the top of your head?”

 

“I could rectify it for you.”

 

“If that’s an anal joke, I want you to pack your things and get out.”

 

“It wasn’t, but if you’re open to the idea, just say the word. God can’t see if you use the back door.”

 

“You’re disgusting.”

 

“Like you’re not curious,” he says.

 

She stands, shakes her head. “Gross.”

 

“Do you know what the difference between an Eiffel Tower and a Drawbridge is?”

 

“You mean in France?”

 

He laughs and doesn’t answer.

 

Apprehension comes over her slowly, “That’s fucked up.”

 

“What’s wrong with three consenting adults having a good time?”

 

“You and Seth never got jealous of each other?”

 

He only smiles. “It’s a real bonding experience.”

 

“What the fuck is wrong with you?”

 

“Don’t kink shame, Katie-Cakes. It’s not like you haven’t thought about it, Seth and me fucking you. I’ve seen your memories, I’ve seen inside of you.”

 

“Seeing ain’t the same as being there. I’ve seen inside _you_ too. Seth saved all the pretty bank tellers for you to pat down because you didn’t touch a real girl way past puberty.”

 

He glowers at her, she's hit a nerve. “It’s stupid if you think you can hold onto your virtue when you're damned like me.”

 

She fluffs her hair and makes to leave. “You’re only saying that because you're mad I won't give it to you.”

 

Before he can respond she's already disappeared, out back in her own world, she’s getting back to her old self, he thinks.

 

* * *

 

She starts asking him a question from the hall and stops in confusion at the kitchen threshold. Her thermos is open and he’s pouring a flask full of blood inside of it.

 

It’s not animal blood. It’s simple arithmetic adding up suddenly, her lessening fatigue and stronger body, her clearer mind and better sense of humor. He’s been feeding her human blood.

 

All her newfound strength finds a use in her assault on him.

 

He’s been dosing her for almost a month, kept on a steady diet of human blood hidden by pickpocket hands in her usual fair.

 

In between blows he yells, the most real emotion she’s seen from him, like he cares. “You were starting to look dead.”

 

“I am dead.”

 

His grip on her arms is steely, “Yeah, now you’re turning yourself into a corpse.”

 

“So you won’t fuck corpses? Good.”

 

He manhandles her to the entry way, her feet drag and she turns herself to boneless deadweight but it doesn’t help, he only pulls her along. In the hall mirrors he makes her stare at her own face. She’s sallow for sue but the gauntness is slight, her hair is stringy and he pushes up up to show her where blood has crusted on her earlobes and neck. She looks sick but it takes a long time before starvation sets in on something that’s not human anymore.

 

“Does hiding it in my food make you feel less like a liar? You might as well eyeball hand me. It’s the same thing.”

 

“I’m not going to stick around if you act like such a fucking kid, you are going to fucking die. Don’t you get that?”

 

He lets go of her and turns away. She catches herself on the stair banister. She can’t shake the feeling that he wants her to get on her knees and beg for him to stay, wants her desperate for his company. The only one who could ever give him that kind of need was Seth, but Seth is gone and Kate is not an alternative to his brother.

 

“So, I’ll see you around then,” she says, and the ghost of her loneliness whispers softly.

 

“Yeah, sure,” he says, scuffing the toe of his shoe against the floor.

 

He does leave, but he comes back weeks later and finds her worse than she’s ever been before. In his absence there’s not much left. There’s no one else.

 

* * *

 

She’s hanging over the side of the bed, puking her guts out, she feels drunk, she tried it once, Junior Prom, too much spiked punch at an after party and the room spun and spun, she feels like she’s in a vortex and being sucked down, only to climb back up before falling again. When she dry-heaves it tastes like bones, maggots, little feathers and mouse tails, there’s a hairball from stray cats stuck in the back of her throat. The world is out of focus. She loses consciousness for a few days.

 

* * *

 

The day he comes back she opens her eyes.

 

He’s in the living room and he smells like a fresh kill.

 

The cable is still on but the lights only show how badly the house has fallen under the rule of dust and musty decay despite his past efforts to keep it livable.

 

From the doorway she watches the slope of his shoulders over the back of the couch, the rise of each unnecessary breath. Her steps are silent. She might be a ghost.

 

She sits next to him on the couch wearing a cotton nightgown that’s never been big enough for her. Her hair is lank and her legs are prickly with days of growth on them. She hasn’t gotten up in four days and he startles at how silently she’d come in and sat down beside him.

 

His face is full of old hurts and pity. It’s his fault for trying to con her. She hasn’t eaten anything, she doesn’t trust him anymore. She touches his arm and slips fingers over his nail beds, strokes the knob of his wrist, traces the veins running through the pale underside of his arm.

 

When she presses the back of her hand against the back of his and let’s her fingers curl and uncurl he has no real recourse besides turning and pushing her down under him.

 

“Come on, let me feed you.” He whispers, like a snake in her ear. Like she’s Eve and he’s temptation.

 

She loses track of him, her hunger is so constant it’s only another part of her, a sixth finger or a wisdom tooth.

 

There’s the damp flick of his tongue against the safety of the bottom hem of her nightie. He pushes it up with one big hand and nothing is safe anymore.

 

He slides down her simple underwear and they get lost in his pocket. He looks up from between her thighs with his educated gaze, and she looks back at him, curious, a flower beginning to bloom out of its wilt.

 

“What’s this from?” he asks the scar near the inside of her left knee, long, jagged.

 

“Scott pushed me off the swingset-- needed twenty-two stitches.”

 

“And this?” he maps the faded spot in the shape of a sun on her right hip.

 

“Birthmark,” she says dragging nails across his scalp behind his ears.

 

“I didn’t think you’d be so calm.”

 

She squirms.

 

She doesn’t think she can do this. But it feels like they should get it out of the way, so they do.

 

He does, for her. She gets to where they both are trying for, a higher plane of temporary existence but things feel shallow and tepid, his mouth is warm but she feels it from far away, thinking of nothing.

 

It’s empty, waxy, foggy, the way he must have seen things without his glasses.

 

She goes for a walk alone after, barefoot and barely dressed on the street she used to ride a scooter down, every lumpy asphalt tar strip done over every summer is still just so, just right, right out of her memory.

 

Every set of initials is still etched into the sidewalk, the tree with the missing swing but long lasting chainlink, the world in sleepy suburbia doesn’t change, a monument of time, like any aztec temple deep in a green place.

 

There’s no one else living on her block.

 

He’s smoking on the front stoop.

 

“Where did you go?”

 

She shrugs, she wonders if he’s hurt by it, his ego, his deep-seated little boy needing to prove he’s good at something that the man in him rebukes.

 

She comes back just a little bit thinking of his tongue pressed flat, dragged up, his thumb slipping up the same way, like he’s loading a clip, the press of it. On her pussy. He said _pussy_ and it didn’t sound juvenile or crass, just impossibly filthy, slow, awful, the best thing she’s ever heard.

 

She comes to see how good it might have been only in retrospect. She wants to keep thinking about it but things blow away, like his smoky exhale. Her mind is a short fuse and an etch a sketch during an earthquake, “I’m hungry.”

 

She wonders if this is how other people feel, unable to care, she didn’t care and she let him open her knees with his shoulders and put his mouth between her legs, his tongue inside and it doesn’t seem as dirty as it does unbelievable. She can’t register her own disbelief. It seems like a dream.

 

“I let you go down on me.”

 

“Yeah. You even said ‘ _thank you_.’ Will you let me feed you now?”

 

“I feel like I won’t remember it.” She says softly, ignoring his question.

 

She doesn’t and a secret thrill runs through him when they play Scrabble later and he spells t-o-n-g-u-e.

 

She rolls her eyes and flushes, it’s downright virginal he thinks still tasting her in his mouth, her bitterness on his lips.

 

* * *

 

“I’m just full of stuffing. There’s nothing vital left. It’s worse than being empty I think.” She said it to the open curtains, the empty space in her bed, the white paint-peeling walls, the ceiling, the deaf, mute room, alone and at night.

 

He feels how badly she wished someone had listened when she told them not to turn her.

 

She stopped taking sacraments, she no longer prays.

 

He’s noticed.

 

“Losing faith, your cherry up next?”

 

“…Good night.” She says to the house.

 

* * *

 

Her head lolls against the white tiles, her bath water is cloudy but her nipples are as pink as her cunt, she lifts a freshly shaved leg, “No bumps or scrapes, see?” It’s like he’s a phantom she doesn’t really see.

 

She stands up and he looks, one once-over to tide him over through her temporary insanity. She lifts her arms and he wraps her in a towel, lifts her feet over the edge of the tub.

 

She presses a damp kiss to his clavicle.

 

“I’m glad you’re here.”

 

* * *

 

There’s a man in the house.

 

She does not know whose house it is.

 

When he tries to grab for her she runs, out the house’s back door and into the street, it’s night out, he follows after and drags her kicking and screaming back inside.

 

A neighbor’s light turns on but no one comes out to investigate, he holds her down and strokes her hair while she struggles. Eventually she exhausts herself to sleep, and he sits with her curled in his lap all night.

 

* * *

 

She’s talking in circles, he doesn’t know what she's getting at, it sounds like she’s talking about history when she repeats _Columbus sailed the ocean blue in fourteen hundred ninety-two_ six times over the course of twenty minutes.

 

He gets her into bed and tucks her in like a child, smoothing down her hair. She looks pale and gaunt, and he thinks again about feeding her.

 

“I don’t want it,” she says, he’ll never get used to anyone besides Seth knowing what he’s thinking.

 

“Who says I’d give it to you anyways?” he’s meaning to be soft, like a joke, but she peers up at him through bloodshot eyes, her irises are jaundice.

 

When she shoves him back on the bed he isn’t threatened, she’s as weak as a baby bird fallen out of the nest, she doesn’t go for his throat like he thought she would, he would’ve let her anyways. Instead, it’s a surprise when he hears the scrape of a zipper, her tiny fingers prod at the button on his jeans until it pops loose, she peels the denim down and he lifts his hips on instinct, his briefs slide with.

 

He’s already half-hard at the implications, at just being near her; the errant scent of her, soil and pollen, it’s a natural aphrodisiac, he groans with the dip of her head and the soft silk of her hair splaying against his thighs.

 

He should feel bad, should try to stop her, but it happens so quick, her little tongue on his cock, suddenly, she laps like a kitten, he wonders where she’s going with it, but when she takes him halfway into her mouth he’s so hard it hurts. She sucks softly, tries to talk but her mouth is full, he says something about table manners and feels the prick of her fangs against the head of his erection, hisses through his teeth and bucks, she takes him deeper before gagging, pulling away, a single thread of saliva sits between her mouth and the tip of him, the top hem of his jeans is violet with blood that’s dripping out of her ear.

 

It comes from her nose next, when she takes him back into her mouth he almost tells her to stop, but something about the scent of it is hot, his brain feels foggy as she slurps, it’s clumsy, her teeth scrape again and he puts a hand on the back of her head, tries to lead her, she takes a few steady thrusts until she’s gagging again, he thinks she’s going to choke right there on his dick and shifts away, he’s ripped people apart but the idea of her retching on him makes his spine shrivel up, he waits for her to adjust, she seems halfway gone, her gaze is far, it isn’t yellow anymore but it isn’t quite jade either, he wonders if he’ll be able to finish but then she’s curving the ‘o’ of her lips around him again, despite the fact she’s not very good at sucking him off it’s still her mouth on his cock, her hair wrapped between his fingers. He’s jerked it countless times with just the idea of this, the moment he saw the milk of her skin come dripping and shiny and red out of that pool, even on nights where he slept in bed next to a goddess, he couldn’t help in the time between dreams but think of the little martyr girl who slipped through his fingers. All cherry pie and Revelations.

 

For a few more minutes he’s lit up in short jolts, the prick of a fang, a hot held exhale, the flat of her tongue holding the taste of his precum.

 

Her movements slow after a few minutes, he’s only half hard again, he thinks his dick is bleeding from how many times she’s nipped him. When she pulls away it’s with a slur about Christopher Columbus, he can’t help but laugh as she wipes the pink tinged spit off the side of her mouth with the back of a knobby wrist, he can see her ribs through her t-shirt and he sighs away his humor, pulls up his jeans and buttons them closed, tucks her back in.

 

When he tries to go she grabs his hand and asks him to stay, he relents only because he still wants to feel the coldness of her against him, she falls asleep with soft breaths against his throat, her nosebleed stains the front of his shirt.

 

He touches her gums and coaxes her fangs to drop, her chapped lips follow after his bleeding fingers, they follow to the bend of his arm. She’s not really asleep but she’s somewhere in-between awareness and a dream. She nurses at his pulse like a newborn, all soft sounds and little sucks.

 

Seth would mock him for how maternal it all feels and how that's what gets his dick hard again.

 

 

 

 

 


	3. Francessca

 

 

 

She’s done something bad. The planks of the back porch groan like hungry bellies under her ruined Keds. The front of her throat is cold and her chin is itchy, there are red flakes under her nails when the motion light catches her losing a half remembered game of red light, green light.

 

In the kitchen the refrigerator hums, and gurgles like she’s woken it up.

 

In her living room Richie looks at her from the couch like a man instead of a monster. His head turned, curious, watchful.

 

She’s high. 

 

The teenager she’s just killed in the woods behind the house was high, looking up at the stars.

 

Another lost druggie in a town slowly being choked to death by foreclosure and unmowed lawns turning to jungles.

 

She’d gone into the woods because of the deer everywhere but it wasn’t a deer she’d crippled before holding down over a bed of dry leaves while she gave into something that’s a sin, greed or gluttony, and she can still taste the high-school dropout in the back of her throat, the hot spice and bitter tang of adderall and pot. 

 

Richie doesn’t grin like she's expected him to. He’s not the animal she thought he was, all killing and eating and fucking. Her entire body is lit up.

 

_ Fucking _ , she thinks sounds good, the best thing ever, she’s covetous for being touched.

 

She can read his expression through the haziness of what feels like a dream but is really just the drugs. Her sudden uneasiness hurts and he pities her, she can read it all over his face. He likes to think he hides it so well, that pride of his. 

 

She reads him like an open book, it’s the way that it’s always been between the two of them. She wonders if that counts as kismet.

 

But, she’s so sick of him and his lonely boy looks that she wishes he’d do something, she wishes he’d make her do something.

 

She has done something. 

 

She’s done  _ exactly  _ what he’s told her she should do and he still can’t pretend to look happy about it. Not once has he looked happy about anything besides talking about Seth. She snarls and barely feels it when his hands touch the flare of each hip.

 

In the back of her mind, the sober part, she wonders when she got close enough for him to reach out and touch her but tasting real blood, sucking down a real soul only makes her remember what it tasted like when he was slipping it into her thermos of livestock scraps and it only makes her remember what his body tastes like, precum and gunpowder, and, what his mouth felt like on hers. 

 

What she feels must be the rapture of the guilty because he wonders how she knows those things, she’s lost time and can’t remember what’s she’s done in her hunger. Maybe something’s whispering to her, not god but the other one.

Richie only stares at her, coiled tight, waiting for her to move in a way he expects. It’s vulgar how well he sits on her couch and how well she can perch over his legs and lap and how easily her hands lead his to places that are still mostly untouched by others. 

 

She wonders if they’ve done this before. He tips up his chin to bare his throat and she slots her pelvis closer to his like their trading tit for tat.

 

It feels like her mind is walking away from her. She can’t focus on much more the the feel of his slicked back hair under her palms and the cool hard edges of his black frames.

 

Once, his brother reached out in his opioid stupor, big hands pawing at her breasts and neck and she’d liked it as much as she didn’t. 

 

She’d wanted Seth to touch her more times than she cares to admit, it’s a goddamn tragedy, and she knows shock makes people lean on others that look strong even if all they are is weak, broken, so she doesn’t beat herself up over it. 

 

Sometimes, she thinks she understands Richie because she’s lived the life he’s lived too, once. 

 

She knows what it is to be Seth Gecko’s sidekick, she’s heard the stories of their asshole dad and all the people who gave up on them, it isn’t an excuse but it is a reason to be what he is, what he was.

 

She gave Seth a bloody lip despite how much she wanted him in some sick, lonely way; he wrote it off as tripping on the furniture and not her elbow the next morning.

 

But, the memory of Seth disappears when she presses closer to Richie. She thinks of how she’s on the other side of things now. Seth wasn’t good and his brother isn't any kinder, but there’s something about the Geckos that gets her lost to the pull of their gravity, burning up in the atmosphere on her way back down to Earth.

 

She pushes Richie’s palm down past the elastic of her underwear and his fingers press right up on her, almost inside, they slide between her folds and she wants to apologize that she’s made his fingers all slippery but she feels foggy and naive. 

 

She swallows, shivers.

 

He takes his hand from between her legs, his appendage returned to its rightful place of nowhere near the one-day wedding gift she’s never going to get to give. 

 

She thinks about Kyle with a sudden pang of sadness, the innocent blood makes her remember things she’s forgotten to think about, the people she left behind or didn’t try hard enough to save. She shoved a stake into her daddy’s heart because she had to reap the consequence the Gecko brothers sowed.

 

She’s a burned out meteor, iron ore and space garbage. A fact from one of his books bobs up to the surface, the Mayans and Aztecs made weapons out of the metal found in fallen space rock.

 

Suddenly her high is like falling from the sky, dead spinning, head over legs, blood hitting her from all her limbs, a sudden dose of adrenaline, dopamine, oxytocin, overloading her heart and head and she’s cycling into anger, the flare of her nostrils and tightening in her muscles, the tingle of her spine, she tugs on his collar with a hand at his nape and pulls his tie free. She eats from his throat, and it’s worse than the shame or the rage or her loneliness. 

 

He can make her feel better for a little while. Richard Gecko likes being a monster. He likes being someone people are afraid of. Under his skin and in his veins there’s something pumping, like blood but not blood.

 

In her frenzy she feels like an ever righteous hand striking down the unrepentant, she feels like every happy sinner trying to fuck into someone hard enough to find peace or every killer full of wrath who can’t stop themselves after crushing something under their palms.

 

He doesn't push her off, maybe he's been hoping for it. 

 

He helps her detach when she’s sated, full of blood and queasy from it,. He tips his head and drops his shoulder, her fangs coming free and a trickle of blood like a river over his white collar, but not before she's seen the pure pretty moments of his time with a woman who’d lived a thousand years, the implosion, the bed they shared, the unsettled distance between them, the long moment they were just passing by each other, her to the scaffold and him out of his brother’s shadow.

 

And not before she sees herself get shot and feels his gut bottom out and something washes through him like ice and knives and snakes. He’d felt bad. He’d felt guilty. It’s the only true remorse she’s ever felt from Richard Gecko in the metaphoric eternity that she has known him.

 

She tastes the codependence between him and Seth, she swallows the reluctance to admit that he’s better without his brother, she’s fed by how sentimental he is about seeing her wear flannel or her mother’s cross, the comics she picks up at the supermarket that remind her of Scott.

 

The raw want that she’s taken for sustenance gives her a stomach ache, she slips off his lap to the floor and stumbles her way to her room, her old bedroom that smells like him and her and staleness, she lays under the bed with forgotten stuffed animals and tries not to claw her insides out before morning when the high wears off.

 

She thinks of swimming in the open water of his mind, naked and bloody and shot doing a dead man’s float in his frontal lobe. 

 

Later, he lifts the bedskirt and his eyes are there in the dark.

 

“It’s safe to come out now.”

 

She’s curled up against the wall like a balled up sock kicked off in someone’s sleep, collecting dust and dead bugs.

 

“I thought you forgot about me. I’ve been under here for hours.”

 

His smile is soft and he settles belly down on the floor boards. 

 

“Forgot?”

 

“It was my turn to hide. You guys always forget about me.”

 

His smile fades, she’s lost for a little while still. She comes back to herself and comes out from under her bed spilling apologies like a tapped vein.

 

They sit side by side, spines against the frame. “Scott and my cousins always left me for last during hide and seek because they knew I’d wait.” 

 

He tells her about the time that him and Seth tried out for the soccer team, how no one wanted him on the mock bracket because he was gangly and four-eyed. Seth made the final cut and he got second string. Seth was goalie, hot shit, and he sat on the sidelines in the shade of his brother’s glory, as usual. 

 

“I was okay with it,” he says. He means it, she knows.

 

“I want him to be happy, but always being second string takes a toll.”

 

“Scott felt that way at school.” They could have been a family on the news talking about how they never saw the warning signs of America’s next school shooter, just another family whose lifestyle and faith was called to account for everything going wrong with everyone else.

 

She wonders how much worth free-will actually has when people can’t even agree on self worth.

 

“Some people are born outcasts,” Richie tells her.

 

She shakes her head in shame. “It isn’t fair.”

 

“Life isn’t fair.”

 

She feels betrayed.“Not even God is fair.” 

 

She feels like a betrayer. 

 

“I thought he was supposed to be. It’s kind of his deal, right?” he asks.

 

“ _ Shall we receive good and shall we not also receive evil _ ,” she says, wondering if she’s gotten the words right, it’s been a long time since she’s heard them said out loud.“Book of Job. Old Testament. It was my father’s favorite.”

 

“Did he preach about fire and brimstone, too?”

 

She looks away, off to spiders congregating in the corner, the light in the room shines on their web that hangs over the Special Moments cross above her bed-- the glare hurts her too-alert eyes. “After my mom died, it felt that way. But he was right, wasn’t he? Look where we are now. Who knows, maybe he was a prophet, too.”

 

* * *

 

It’s been three da ys and she’s already walked through her own home during daylight hours without burning in the sunlight that falls through the windows. The only thing she can think about is how embarrassingly wet she’d been against his fingertips. 

 

He’s made himself scarce, she’s grateful.

 

She’s afraid of how easy it had been, how good it felt to not be hungry. She’s still got the conscience of a preacher’s daughter.

 

The phone rings in the kitchen.

 

Freddie asks how she is, if the house is okay and if there’s anything he can do. He doesn’t mention that the checks he sends the week before his phone calls are never cashed. He doesn’t ask if she’s been eating, if he asks then he’ll have an answer, one that means she’s a monster, another means he’s failed at the duty he thinks he has.

 

Kate tells him things are okay and that she is tired.

 

She wonders if he calls at night to make sure she’s home, because he wants an answer to a question he won’t ever ask.

 

“You haven’t told him I’m here,” Richie says, he stands just inside the back door, hip pressed into the edge of the counter. He grins, “are you ashamed of me?” He’s teasing her. She doesn’t have an answer to throw back at his feet.

 

The stick of his pomade is lax, there’s a piecey hank of hair hanging over his brow, he’s in his suit but his tie is loose. There’s something easy in the half-cast of his stare, she’s piecing together what he’s been up to. 

 

He doesn’t smell like blood, he smells like the laundry detergent of someone else’s sheets and their skin, their sweat.

 

He’s still grinning when he shrugs. “I guess I’m just your dirty secret.”

 

“Do you really want Seth to find out you’re here?” It’s not fair for her to throw his brother’s existence at him but when she takes a step closer he smells like he’s fucked a stranger and she’s  _ mad _ .

 

His eyes flash yellow, “I think you’d mind more.”

 

He isn’t wrong. She thinks of Freddie. She thinks of Seth. It hurts. 

 

Guilt settles along the lines of her bones and when she stops eating again it goes for almost a year.   
  


 

* * *

 

They go out somewhere, out of town, in the big city with lights and colors, she’s become so used to the dying breed of Bethel that the smells are overwhelming, she asks him to go home when she starts to salivate, he pushes her forwards with a hand on the small of  her back and doesn’t say a word.

 

He takes her to the movies and she tries to ignore how much more people stare at them, they don’t blend in a city full of different people. She’s ten years his junior eternally. 

 

He looks like he could be her much older brother but when they take their seats in the theater before the lights dim and he puts his arm around her shoulders and plays with her hair, it’s gotten so long. A few older couples stare like they’re offended. She shakes it off, his arm and the dirty looks that only make her spiteful, and focuses on the rom com they paid to see, it’s fickle, she remembers when she was a teenager in school and loved the kind of blockbuster bullshit he’s brought he to.

 

Halfway through the movie some teenagers in the back start going at it, two girls on the cusp of womanhood, horny and unsettled, both she and him can hear it, the wet smack of their mouths and scoop of their tongues tangling. 

 

Eventually, she can smell the pheromones, the beginnings of sin and it makes her shift uncomfortably, she’s hungry and her body thrums, warm and slickening, the backs of her legs sweat and stick to the burgundy vinyl of the theater seats.

 

“Let’s go,” he whispers in her ear after he’s pushed her hair behind it.

 

She’s surprised he doesn’t want to stay and watch her suffer, they leave quietly out the side exit and into the cold night. It’s nearly Christmas, snow has just begun to fall and they walk along the streets looking at all the holiday decorations.

 

Eventually, they settle in some park, it’s vacant and dark, the benches are frozen where she sits in a skirt too short for winter, he brought it home for her the other day from some new shopping outlet in Houston he said, she wonders if that’s the truth or if he picked it up from the home of one of the random women he’s fucked behind her back. It’s hard to imagine Richie going into a Forever 21 and asking one of the employees to help him find an outfit for a girl without having mall security called on him. “I’m hungry,” he says eventually cutting into her mental meanderings like a cold knife.

 

“I don’t want you to hurt anyone,” she admits, but her tone waffles.

 

“What if they deserve it?”

 

Her first instinct is to deny murdering any of God’s creations, but the hunger is gnawing at her insides with sympathy. She remembers Rafa in a stark moment of clarity, her long gone friend who tried so hard not to be the evil thing he was. 

 

“Let me pick, then,” she says, an epiphany in real time. His smile is deadly. “Be my guest.”

 

They wander on the dangerous side of town. He tries to persuade her to pick quickly, a vagrant or petty thief, he’s  _ starving _ he says after an hour but she gives him a sharp look and his face falls, he waits another thirty minutes before she picks up on whimpering a few blocks down, someone trying to scream for help but too proud, too full of wrath to admit defeat. 

 

He follows after her, two steps back.

 

Rage seethes through her when they walk to the back of a dark alley, there are two figures on the ground  both in rags, unwashed and forgotten by the city that made them. One of them is a girl.

 

“Fucking junkie bitch!”

 

“I didn’t take nothin’ off ya!”

 

Kate can smell the girl’s fear and her fangs throb inside her gums.

 

“Him,” she says to Richie.

 

He comes out from behind her like a shadow made real and pulls the rail thin man off the run-away without effort, there’s some struggle before teeth sink into flesh, but not much, not nearly enough to preserve life.

 

Kate helps the girl off the ground,“Do you have a cellphone?” Kate asks. The girl, rangy and stinking pushes her hard, Kate tips back, her bottom cold on the asphalt where her skirt has pulled up.

 

The run-away glares and slides back across the alley to stare at Richie enjoying his meal loudly, there’s a blankness to the girl’s dirty face that Kate understands all too well. 

 

“Come on,” she says, trying again to lead the girl out onto the lit street, her salvaged coat is ripped from the struggle, buttons popped. The girl who can’t be any older than Kate used to be is menstruating, Kate can smell blood from between the girl’s legs, it makes her mouth water and she turns away in shame. 

 

The girl simply stares at Richie and Kate wonders how much longer the girl will last on the streets, wonders if she’s better used as a meal than another statistic.

 

Kate shakes her head, she knows her eyes are yellow and her teeth are sharp. The girl runs and Kate lets her.

 

Richie is oblivious or maybe just uncaring, the man in his grasp is struggling with his last breath, the knife he tried to scare the runaway with is stuck in Richie’s side but he seems unperturbed. Richie looks at her and offers his spot at the man’s throat.

 

“I’m not hungry.” 

 

Disappointment washes over his bloody face. “But, I thought we were bonding.” His fangs drip.

 

Hers jump in her gums, yet she sits on the metal support of a filthy trash can and doesn’t partake. He swoops low to try and press their mouths together when he’s finished eating. She turns her head and he looks slighted. 

 

“Thanks.”

 

His mouth leaves a bloody smear on her cheek and neck, she startles and shrugs him off, he’s already walking away. 

 

His mouth steams in the cold and he whoops once loudly, triumphant on a worthwhile meal.

 

They leave before the cops show up and don’t bother to hide the evidence; in the car she pulls the knife from his side and licks it clean.

 

“You should keep it,” he says with a scanty nod mouth still messy. Adding, a moment later, “It’s a good knife.”

 

She looks at it and sets it between them in the center console cup holder. 

 

“You do know I’m old enough to drive, right?”

 

“You learned on a manual?”

 

She goes silent, there’s so much she hasn’t been able to learn, most of that is her own fault, because she’s lived some Grey Garden’s existence, because she’s been so stubborn.

 

“I’ll teach you.” he says.

 

* * *

 

The world continues to show her its unending wave of corruption and callousness a few weeks later when she walks home from the supermarket. Bethel has become a den of druggies and thieves, replacing its dying elderly with sinners.

 

On the dimly lit path here is sudden scuffling, it happens quickly and because she hasn’t fed in nearly two years and her instincts are not what they should be an arm wraps heavy around her waist, its twin clapping over her mouth before she’s even heard a heartbeat.

 

“Don’t scream,” the stranger says.

 

She doesn’t, she just keeps walking and pulls lazily from his grasp, she’s still stronger than an a human. She barely feels the slap that comes after, her face stays blank. Somewhere, in the back of her brain, in a place where her humanity lurks she realizes she is thinking like an animal, that she is operating as one. Higher thought leaves her, she observes what happens from inside her own skull.

 

“Hey man, maybe we shouldn't be…”

 

“Shut u-” 

 

She’s holding a boy not much older than her brother was by the throat, his friend’s hands shake. 

 

Hers do not. 

 

A boy shoots her, once, and she snaps another boy’s neck.

 

When she looks at the one with the gun he staggers forward and the weapon falls from his grasp. 

 

She bleeds and holds his head with both hands so tightly that every small blood vessel bursts behind his eyes. She leaves the bodies behind and walks the rest of the way home.

 

Richie can smell her as she starts to limp up the driveway. She doesn’t answer any of his questions.

 

“You won’t heal if you don’t feed.” He tells her two days later.

 

She wants him to hear it when she says she shouldn’t be allowed to live, but the words are softer than a whisper and for all he sees he doesn’t hear a damn thing.

 

Something moves inside of her viscera, she performs kitchen surgery on herself and drops three metal slugs into the sink after having held the coils of her own insides in her hands. Her guts are grey and she’s fascinated by the mesentery that held them so neatly arranged.

 

He comes home and finds her at the top of the stairs after following the snail trail of red, she’d heard Scott practicing chords in his room, she smears her hand down the door and it smacks into the floor when she misses the knob.

 

In the bathroom he’s rolled up his shirt sleeves to wash the grit and detritus from her pulled apart abdominal cavity, he’s surgeon neat and not squeamish. He doesn’t ask her to feed and slowly she heals under gauze and careful stitches made from fishing line.

 

“My mom’s gonna be so mad I made a mess.”

 

His mouth opens like a puppet’s and he makes a sound like he’s startled. She goes limp, unconsciousness is warm and dark.

 

* * *

 

He’s folding laundry when she walks behind him, across the room and then out the back door, he doesn’t startle, he doesn’t think much about it for the first five minutes. He isn’t oblivious like his brother, he keeps tabs on her, like he can feel her feet walking against the ground; he’s not sure why it’s like that, with some more than others, the moment she came into his orbit his senses were hooked onto her, he can’t let go even when he tries to cut at it with a dull knife.

 

When it’s been too long, he puts the sheets in his hands back into the basket, it’s whites day and he still needs to iron the shirts he wears for Saturday night services when she remembers to mark off the days on the calendar.

 

He worries when he loses track of her, it’s only been three weeks since he found her and her intestines spread across the kitchen floor like some gruesome attempt to recreate Cannibal Holocaust.

 

She’s gone outside.

 

From the porch the sky is red and orange and the sun has gone down enough to only just leave him feeling stung, but he fed the night before and she hasn’t eaten anything more substantial than a housecat in weeks. She’s naked and her calves are turning ember red, the tops of her shoulders are the lit end of twin cigarettes, she’s dissolving into orange lace and sunset and he drags her against him, her skin blackens on the edges and ash smears his shirt front.

 

He falls with her onto the linoleum inside the back door, the kitchen will need to be mopped but it isn’t the first time. She hisses and her face is all scales and burn and her soft, little body against his prompts only a blood rush south even when half her face is a horror show mess of burn and char; her scent is a mix somewhere between singed flesh and valley lilies. 

 

He wants to ask if she wants to die yet, if she’s fucking nuts, if she misses her broken brother and weak mother and coward father that much she wants to burn up at day’s end, but her eyes are empty and he only forces her fangs down deep into the fount of his throat; it burns but somehow only serves to make his erection throb that much more.

 

And she’s so far gone that she goes gladly, sucking him up, drinking him down, and he lets himself get lost in how her mouth takes pulls from his carotid and how she’s got everything hot and slick between her thighs seeping through his shirtfront. 

 

There’s a lazy grind to her pelvis while she feeds, he wonders about the way she circles, figures out it’s one of his buttons smoothing over her clit in time with the roll of her tongue over the mess she’s made of his neck, sloppy and careless like her cunt trying to find something to fill it. 

 

He could slip her full of fingers but he’s not one for doing things halfway. He knows what she wants.

 

He goes for her mouth with a husked ‘come here,’ and she follows for his lips and teeth against hers while he helps her with his belt, and it’s her hands that pull him out, achingly hard already, palme him and it’s her moving to push him inside, her untouched cunt so wet it hardly works, he’s slipping out of her but she gives an angry hiss before finding the right angle and filling herself up with every inch of him in one full-final push down. 

 

He barely feels bad, eyes rolling back in his head knowing that she’ll feel awful and ashamed and cry later maybe, but even the idea of how she’ll feel later makes it hotter when she works herself down onto him. She’s small in his grasp, the softness of her skin and swish of her hair around his shoulders when he presses his forehead to hers, she feels like a dream, it wasn’t like this before, he’s never wanted someone to want him so badly.

 

Forget that she’s a virgin, that he’s the first to rob her of her innocence in this minute way, he knew before that she was untouched, but there was no physical proof until now, her body moving but without real movement, he can’t teach her anything when her belly is full of hot blood, she needs to be hungry to learn. He puts hands over her ass and pulls her close, holds her in place, full of him and her breathing settles like she might be sleeping. 

 

Her body clutches at him like a hand. She’s with him still.

 

Her burns heal with sucking sounds of the skin knitting back together. He jostles her with a tilt of his hips and she makes a small animal sound, some soft coo that might have made him feel sorry for her. She’s herself again.

 

“No take backs.” He’s so desperate for the grasp of her he isn’t beyond begging. “You might as well finish what you started.”

 

She does without his groveling but she does cover his eyes with her hands, his glasses skitter with insect sounds across the floor in her haste to take them from him. He doesn’t know if she’s crying but he wouldn’t be surprised. She makes sounds, her body and her voice, all slickness and short shallow gasps, when he spills hot and sticky there’s surprise in her motions, he cums so hard the world loses focus, she takes every last drop with a gasp like he’s slapped her. 

 

He wants to put fangs in her just to know how it feels from her end.

 

When she tries to pull off he holds her thighs tighter so she can’t twist away from what they’re doing, the things they’ve wanted to do. Things he’s long imagined, things she’s still ashamed of.

 

He can fix that.

 

“Hey,” he smooths the hair from her face, she shies away, her eyes staring at her shoulder, he concentrates on the freckles on her neck, there’s a hickie rapidly disappearing on her collar he doesn’t even remember putting there. “Don’t be ashamed.”

 

He knows she is, he still feels half-hard at the idea, her innocence burns him. 

 

“I wanna go to sleep, now,” she says, her voice is so small.

 

She tries to move again, to leave him on the floor of the kitchen and escape to the safety of blankets she can hide under but he doesn’t let her, this is the longest he’s ever been inside someone after he’s come, it feels odd and strangely thrilling. “Kate, look at me. Look.”

 

He forces her stare with one hand tangled in her hair, twisting her head, she’s stronger now that she’s fed, but only so, he could still break her with a pinkie. When she tries to close her eyes he pushes up on an elbow and bites her, softly, on her throat. She startles and yelps like a baby animal, he holds fast to her scruff until he can see the green of her irises, she’s red and puffy from tears but it makes her gaze clearer. 

 

“I’m sorry it wasn’t special,” he says, because he is. There’s no regret for what they’ve done, they’ve wanted it for  _ years _ , being inside of her felt like the world coming into focus again, slightly, her skin is cold but somehow he feels warm like this. “It’ll feel better if I make you cum.”

 

“I don’t want that,” she says, but she does not try to twist away, he feels the faintness of a pulse that doesn’t exist thrumming through the veins in her wrist. She’s lying because denial is what she’s been taught.

 

The way she bites her lip is all he needs to get hard again, she smells less like a funeral pyre and more like herself, vanilla and lilies, the faintness of ash. When he bucks up into her she chokes, half between a hum and a curse with her head thrown back and her mouth open, her eyes roll back and she’s still so wet, he’s deep enough inside that every thrust makes her clench.

 

He holds her by the bottom of her spine and her hips follow forwards. Her eyes shut and he grins against the unbearable urge to praise her. The preacher’s daughter is a natural, her mouth a little ‘o’ and hair fanned out around her as she fucks him into stagnancy, for a moment all he can do is take it, she shoves her fingers in his mouth when he moans her name. 

 

Something breaks inside of her, something she doesn’t need anymore, all her forced restraint and self questioning.

 

He lets go of his grasp on the back of her neck and she startles, eyes opening and craning down so he might hold her by it again. There’s the blind fascination in her stare when he pulls her fingers off of his teeth and sucks at his own.

 

She’s new to everything, it makes him feel like a bad man for the things he’ll do to her, with her, the things he’s going to teach her to do to him, but it’s all going to happen none the same.

 

Her mouth opens on a question but there are wet fingertips on the flare of her hip, the gentle drag of them like something barely there all along the curve of her pert ass. She moves up on her knees when they trip to the back of her thigh and he needs to hold her from bolting away when they slide closer to her center to touch over where he’s in her, the open stretch of her. She’s timid and skittish, he waits for her to pull away and she doesn’t.

 

Her breathing stutters and he feels her her get slicker, so does she. He can tell by the way she presses her lips together and won't look him in the eye. 

 

She wears shame like other people wear sunscreen, only half of the time and only because they have to.

 

The desperation she found inside herself is there in her restless shifting to memorize how his dick feels.

 

His cum slowly seeps from between them and it’s warm on his fingers, he paints an invisible heart on the curve of her rear before he presses into the cleft of her ass, she jumps but only a little.

 

“Don’t.”

 

“You keep pushing your ass at me like you want me to play with it.”

 

In the dark of the kitchen he can see the flush light up like neon pink in the vasculature of her body, the brilliant flare of how much she wants what she should not want, especially from him. It’s almost enough to make him nervous, he feels like it’s his first time, too, for just a moment. Something about her has always made things feel new again.

 

His fingers prod and circle, gentle and careful, she’s a body of locks, her guarded virtues a safe to crack, his fingers slip in, one and then two and she presses down her face the same way she pushes her cunt down and her bottom back.  Her teeth worry his chest through his shirt, she whines softly.

 

It’s only when he moves them in a slow cadence to match the clench of her insides, he can feel what he does to her on where he is inside of her and she can’t hold back the counterthrust of her own hips, that she lets out a sob to paint his skin.

 

“I can’t.” She’s breathless. “I drank too much of your blood.”

 

He knows the feeling, like being drunk, the world spins, he presses her closer and soothes her. “Ride it out.” He scissors his fingers and she shakes in his arms. His cock is pressed up as deep as he can get inside her and he’s still fucking her in so many other ways he’s afraid to count them.

 

His blood, his fingers, his cock. He gives her a long stroke in the midst of her shallow ruttings against him.

 

She glares at him with her face half pressed to his chest, he knows she probably thinks he was trying to make a joke, but then he’s bucking up into her hard, she startles as his fingers slip a little deeper, whines, reaches back and grasps his wrist, tries to pull, the pressure is too much. He eases, she clenches every time he moves and he’s trying hard not to cum again, she’s so tight it’s disorientating, even when she’s still leaking from the last time he filled her. 

 

“Richie,” she whines, grinds her clit down against his pelvis, her cheeks look rosy, he can feel his blood sloshing in her stomach as she moves, he wonders if it makes her feel him that much more intensely.

 

“I don’t even know if I’m me.” She says it loud enough so he’ll listen, pause, feel the gnawing of his bones that makes him wonder if she is really her, or if it’s all his wants in her.

 

Her tone isn’t cold but it isn’t warm either when she presses a kiss under his ear and sighs, “don’t mention this tomorrow.” She rubs against his shirt front with her breasts and her hands pull apart the buttons, she touches his bare collar where a tie would rest and then kisses the damp skin there too, her body presses down and back, he drags his fingers out of her only to push them back in, and he plants his feet to leverage her up.

 

In tandem she rocks forward and back, the drag of her cunt a hot suck on his cock, her bottom soft and eager.

 

Her head is tucked against his throat, her tongue licks out, her teeth drag but she’s fighting the urge to feed again. Her body is a mess of small spasms around him, she’s working herself up.

 

She whines again and he wonders if she’s too keyed up to cum, wonders maybe if he should be more gentle, wonders if she’s someone who needs a connection to get off, or comfort or love. He opens his mouth to ask her but then her tongue is shoving the words down, she hastens her pace, he feels like he’s going to break as her hips pound against his, he adds a third finger inside of her ass and she breaks from his mouth to cry out, a few more shallow thrusts before she’s sobbing into his shoulder, her body twitches morosely, she digs her nails into his skin and he bleeds as she climaxes, she doesn’t say his name but her cheek against his temple and how she nuzzles at his pulse while opioids flood her nervous system is just as good.  The clench of her cunt around him is too much, he bucks into her messily a few more times before he loses it again, when he’s finished she’s dripping as she slides off of him and folds into a puddle of limbs on the floor.

 

“You think God saw that?” she asks eventually, curled naked and damp on her side like she’s just been born again.

 

He feels breathless. “Would be hard not to.”

 

He wonders if he should reach out to touch her. She sits up like a fall in reverse, her hair hangs over her shoulder and the long curl of her spine makes him want to drag her back down and put her legs around his head, kiss her clean.

 

She steadies herself on the kitchen counter and doesn’t look down at him when she rises. There’s a hand between her thighs to keep what he’s filled her up with from making a mess as it seeps out of her.

 

In the dark her body is some pale pillar of light, she pads away and he watches the jostle of her hips. Naked, it’s a woman’s walk, tomorrow when he’ll say nothing about what they’ve done he wonders if he’ll still be able to find it when she strides away from him in clothes. 

 

He doesn’t feel like a thief but he knows she didn’t give him anything for free either. He’s the only person who knows what she feels like inside. 

 

The knowledge has cost him something.

 

* * *

 

He watches her eat and thinks about being eaten by her.

 

She looks up from her raw steak,“You’re staring at me.”

 

It’s been almost a month since he’s been inside of her.

 

She doesn’t blush or leave the room when he walks into one any more but she does edge away when he steps too close.

 

Sometimes, she eats things that are alive.

 

Not humans, not yet.

 

* * *

 

She’s feeling more like herself on the day he brings her home a bag of A-positive from the blood drive happening at the town hospital, she’s been screaming in pain for nearly a week straight and when he first offers it to her she refuses with a bubbled growl, she’s been throwing up black goo that has remnants of her insides all morning.

 

“Someone gave it away for free to help someone else. I think you qualify for the donation,” he says.

 

When she turns away it’s almost violent the way he pulls her back, he holds her head back with hands tangled in her hair, she feels like an injured animal being nursed back to health as he forces the blood down her throat. 

 

He’s told her about all the little creatures he tried to help when he was little, the innocent experiences his drunken father ruined for him. Peaches the German Shepherd that their father made Seth shoot. 

 

It’s strange to think about Richie being the the rescuer, she’s always imagined him as the poster child for the Macdonald Triad. 

 

He has a hidden soft side behind the homicidal rage of his core personality, she feels it in how his grip softens as she drinks.

 

Later, when clarity sets in, she tries to walk around the house for the first time in days but she keeps tripping over all his bullshit. 

 

Weapons and trinkets and books, so many fucking books.

 

She finds him in the living room reading one about Ariadne and her red string. “You’re a hoarder,” she accuses. 

 

He dog-ears his page and looks at her over the rim of his glasses. “You’ve never had a problem with it before.”

 

“Because I didn’t notice. But this is ridiculous. Shit has got to go.”

 

“Well, I’m not going to be the one that moves it.”

 

Irritation settles deep in her healing guts, his tone reminds her of Scott, how he never picked up his magazines or the stray pieces of action figures he liked to take apart and put back together again, she was always stepping on things and it drove her nuts that he refused to clean up after himself.

 

“This is  _ my _ house, you wanna live here, then you help clean it.”

 

“There’s mold growing in the bathroom and under the kitchen floorboards, one of the support beams in the basement is rotting and water keeps leaking through the roof when it rains. Yet you’re worried about tripping over my books?”

 

She shakes her head. “It’s the principal, Richard.”

 

“Principal my ass,  _ Katie-cakes _ .”

 

Without thinking, she lunges at him, something like bloodlust and rage unfurls through her chest at the old nickname and she’s punching him in the face, she’s caught in the tailspin of a flashback from so long ago, his face blurs with Scott’s when she punches him again and she hears her brother threatening to tell their mom so she strikes harder she’s never known how to do anything with her rage other than bottle it, when it slips out she understands what finally turned Santanico into a monster, what is turning  _ her _ into a monster too, if she hasn’t already become one. Her limbs are wild as Richie tries to pull her off, eventually all he can do is toss her across the room, she puts a person sized hole in the wall.

 

“Fuck,” she says, standing up and brushing drywall off her shirt. “Now we have to fix that too.”   
  


He simply stares at her from where he’s breathing harshly on the couch, half of his face is purple and swollen but it’s slowly healing back to sharp porcelain. “What’s wrong with you?”

 

“Maybe you’ll stop force feeding me now.” She begins to walk away, has the sudden urge to go up to Scott’s bedroom and dust and sweep. Over her shoulder she tells him again to pick up his books.

 

When she comes back down an hour later they’re all organized neatly in stacked piles, covering up the hole in the living room wall.

 

There’s an accusatory post-it that says:  _ you bit me first  _ on it.

 

She can’t meet his eyes for months. The clarity of satiation only leaves her more willing to be burnt by guilt.

 

* * *

 

He decides, one day, to go with her into town. 

 

She gets the usual, cleaning supplies and butcher’s leftovers, he walks the supermarket at her skirt tails, leans against the cart and pushes it with his elbows. When he throws a pack of Oreos into the basket she quirks a brow at him, he smiles and points to a little girl down the aisle eyeing them.

 

She smells good. It makes her venom glands leak, she swallows the burn, the little girl takes a few steps towards them and Kate shies, she's afraid of the proximity of what can only be described as a treat. The toddler keeps advancing until the mother turns to look, stops the child from wandering off, her gaze lingers a long time on Richie after, on the hug of his jeans and broadness of his shoulders. Kate can see the idle musings of her mind. He looks good dressed down. The suit brings attention but his fake Texan routine is a cloying presence of Marlboro Man meets Brando.

 

“That lady is checking you out.”

 

“She’s a milf,” he answers her, she reddens at his crudeness and leer, the jealousy in the pit of her stomach when he stares at the woman like she's a dolce de leche he wants to sink his teeth into. She hasn’t smelled anyone else on him since they fucked for the first time.

 

Yet, she feels cross, suddenly, tugs the cart away and turns the corner, he follows her to the soup cans, she stares at labels vacantly.

 

“Someone’s green.”

 

“Shut up.”

 

He moves closer. She knows what cologne he’s wearing, he’s too close. “Don't like it when I look at other girls? I thought we weren't like that, I thought you didn't want to remember it in the morning?”

 

“Shut up, Richie.”

 

“You know we could do it right here.”

 

“What?” It sounds like she’s a mouse, squeaking in the wake of a hawk swooping down, a shadow falling over her. He presses up against her while she stares at chicken noodle and low sodium tomato, her fingers grasp at the shelves. He’s hard.

 

“We could be fucking right here and no one would try to stop us. It’s like we are walking around and no one sees us. They know that we’re at the top of the food chain.”

 

“People have eyes.”

 

He sniffs at her nape and groans low in his throat.“So? We could kill them all and give the Campbells display a show.”

 

She feels caught somewhere between lust and chagrin, she doesn't really think she's turned on by the idea of people watching them, but she is turned on by his actions in general, the slow, insistent grind of his hips against her ass, the tip of his erection is bumping up into the softness between her legs and she twitches, she's not wearing any panties, it’s wash day and after so many years she’s lost more pairs of underwear than can be blamed on idle coincidence. 

 

The flimsy old church dress she’s wearing that smells like the tub it's been sitting in for years might as well be gone.

 

She feels herself get wet.

 

He inhales again and she knows that he knows what his body against her spine does, it’s more than a scent, it’s a taste, when she opens her own mouth it’s like a part of him is in her mouth. It’s something special about snakes, something she’s read in one of his books he’s left open so she’ll look at it.

 

She steps a foot out an inch further, it makes her stance wider and it’s like someone’s let go of the leash he’s kept on. He holds a hand against her navel and eases up the front of her dress with the other. His jeans chafe the curve of her ass. His watch band is cool against her mound, she tilts herself forward, he exhales like he’s excited over it, he’s not as in control as he pretends. He’s warmer than she is because he feeds and she wants to be warm inside again.

 

When the milf turns into the soup aisle, child in tow, Kate is wondering what she tastes like, Richie makes a point to keep her pinned to the shelves. His mouth is on her neck and sucking, not drinking but leaving a dark hickey that will fade too soon. 

 

She’s canting forward against the metal links of his stolen watch a silent plea for his fingers to trace over where she’s aching for him, it feels like her will power is crumbled to nothing, all her virgin years of sorrow and she’s a sudden slut for a man who’s never been more than a brand in her dendrites.

 

The woman gasps quietly at the scene and Kate can smell the rush of pheromones as she blushes and turns her child away, it’s intoxicating.

 

And, it’s embarrassing how much she needs to shift, the press of her thighs against each other is slippery.

 

The woman lingers a moment longer than necessary though, her eyes on the way Kate and Richie are locked together, his too big hands holding her in place, she’s got her mouth open with her tongue pressed out and she can't push him off until a long minute later, he groans again and tries to hold her there but she snaps at him with her fangs and he slinks off like a scolded little boy.

 

She holds her spine against the metal cans and tries to catch her breath, her legs shake and her nipples point in his direction.

 

He blinks first and walks away.

 

She finds him in the produce section after getting the rest of the things on their list, he’s eyeing pomegranates and kiwis.

 

“I’ve got blue balls.”

 

She tosses him a can of clam chowder and he catches it without looking. 

 

“The milf could probably help you.”

 

He shakes his head. “I’m craving something else.”

 

She wants to go home, wash off the heat of his hands, hold the shower head between her thighs.

 

He kisses her almost tenderly and holds her hand as they leave the supermarket. For a moment she pretends that they are a normal couple, that this is like the life she wanted, virginal and happy and safe.

 

On the ride home he puts a hand on her knee and keeps his eyes on the road. There’s a taunt to the weight of his palm, they both know how easy it would be for him to fill her with thick fingers and how easy it would be for her to lift the skirt of her dress and squirm against the leather seat of his car and watch him do it, he’d keep it slow and deep, she’d be able to hear the squelch of it.

 

It’s a lesson in self-control and giving in, she should pluck his hand up and return it to the gear shift, instead she lets it stay, warm and subtle on her knee. She’s so wet she has to turn onto her hip to keep the leather from giving her away when she gets out of the car.

 

Later that night she feeds from his wrist while he strokes her hair, when he gets hard she pretends not to notice and falls asleep with her head in his lap like a satiated house cat, but not before she’s thought of the sounds he might make if she slipped her hand around him, fingertips and dragging nails.

 

A part of her, a part that hasn’t been a little girl in decades, wants to know what she could do to him. She imagines it. 

 

Then she remembers.

 

Groggy and half in dreams she mumbles, “I gave you a blowjob.”

 

“Thought you forgot about that.”

 

“I did.”

 

“It wasn’t really a blowjob, don’t feel bad.”

 

When dusk comes she’s in her parents’ bed, tucked in, her shoes by the nightstand, she wonders if he’s noticed what’s missing under her dress. 

 

A deeper, darker, deplorable part wants to know why he didn’t try to fuck her.

 

It’s her own fingers, small and without dexterity, pumping inside of her in the small hours of early morning.

 

She doesn’t muffle the sound she makes when she’s cuming. 

 

She thinks about fucking him and she thinks about eating a child in front on its mother, blood splattered all over a row of  cream of mushroom and and split pea, she thinks about them holding a little girl’s mother between them and feeding while they fuck her.

 

Her fangs puncture her lip and it doesn’t heal until the next afternoon.

 

His gaze catches on it every time she talks.

 

“You make a lot of noise.”

 

* * *

 

One day she’s sitting at the kitchen table reading one of his many books on human anatomy when he comes in through the back door, there’s a cardboard crate with holes punched in the top in his hands, she can smell the animal inside as he sets it on the table and her fangs drop.

 

“No,” he scolds her, pointing a finger like she’s the animal. “This is not for eating.”

 

He opens the box and a small, furry head peeks out with wide eyes. It’s speckled, black and orange and shorthaired. There’s a chunk missing out of its left ear and a puckered socket where its right eye once was, scars all along its curled back, but when she reaches for it the feline lets her stroke its scruff, it’s soft. 

 

It’s the first time an animal has let her touch it without fighting back in years.

 

“Why isn’t it scared?” she asks, usually they know when they are face to face with a predator and run.  Richie shrugs. “The lady at the shelter says she has a fucked up sense of smell.”

 

“You got it from the shelter?”

 

“Strays need homes, too,” he says, he sounds like he’s saying it about more than the cat.

 

She sighs, the feline meows and jumps down into her lap, it curls there happily and begins to purr as she strokes its back. “What’s its name?”

 

“I don’t know, I was thinking I’d leave that up to you, so maybe then you really won’t eat her.”

 

“Cats don’t taste good anyways, they’re just a quick fix,” she admits.

 

He reaches into her lap to pet their new roommate fondly. “So, what’s her name going to be then?”

 

She thinks on it a moment. “Slither.”

 

“That’s not very cute.”

 

“Neither is the cat.”

 

“Touche,” he muses.

 

Later that night they head to the supermarket to get supplies, food and treats, toys and a collar, a new set of feeding bowls. Slither settles in comfortably, she seems fine to stay in bed on the days where Kate cannot move from hunger, curls in their laps because she likes constant attention. 

 

It isn’t awful to have a new companion, especially one who doesn’t talk twenty-four seven just because they like the sound of their own voice, she thinks most days about how she likes cats better than Geckos.

 

* * *

 

She goes with him into Dallas and watches. His mouth is fastidiously neat, there’s no blood on his collar, she waits in the car. 

 

Later, when he invades her space, past the point of polite distance and the common personal bubble length, right against her, knee to knee and chest to chest when she exhales, like they’re lovers, killer and victim, she makes the conscious effort to keep breathing, in, out, in, out.

Male snakes try to leave females breathless, it makes their bodies open enough that they can slither in. She read it in one of his books and saw a youtube video. He bites her and pumps venom into her, disabling escape. It’s disorienting and awful. She doesn’t get the point until hunger sloshes through her gut, until her body washes with heat, he holds her hand and leads her from the passenger seat out onto the street to find something to eat.

 

He was a bad man before he was ever a monster. She used to be good, she  _ was _ good until she was selfish and she wonders who she’s trying to prove something to, she wonders who exactly she’s trying to punish. 

 

She trips on an uneven crack in the sidewalk and her mind is stuck on trying to remember that early morning when she left him on the kitchen floor, wrung out and worn down, when she’d fucked him. He’s been inside of her and she wanted him there. It might be her pride that hurts when she thinks about it, too often and too late for it to be anything but intentional, her body remembers what he felt like inside of it. 

 

There must be a bible story to compare to him shaping her to fit him just right and there’s probably some awful church parable that wives are taught about their husband’s cocks in the sort of marriage classes women like her mother would have talked about after nine p.m on a friday, something high-school health class demolishes as myth. 

 

In most of Texas a health teacher tears off a piece of tape and sticks it to the back of someone’s hand to symbolize partners and purity. The tape gets passed around until it isn’t sticky anymore. 

 

She remembers thinking she never wanted to be a dirty piece of tape. A part of her that isn’t useful for survival wonders how many people he’s fucked.

 

A bar empties out down the block. She’s in rolled up jeans and a t-shirt from a church fundraiser. Her tennis shoes are dishwater grey. In his slacks and polo he looks like he’s about to play golf. 

 

He pulls her towards the door.

 

“There is no way they are going to let me in.”

 

“Of course they are, you forgot to wear a bra.”

 

Her shirt says _Bethel Baptist BBQ 2013_ and underneath there’s the twin pebbling of both nipples. His venom makes them hurt like he’s pinched them, she wants his mouth to soothe the sting.

 

His venom makes her head swimmy. Forty minutes later beyond the press of the crowd she’s pressed someone up against the wall of a dark hallway, a hand that isn’t hers forces itself down the back of her jeans and touches her cunt from behind.

 

She doesn’t startle, she doesn’t pull away, she lets her fangs drop and then she feeds.

 

Richie touches her shoulder, pulls away the stranger’s hand, and takes her place at their throat. There isn’t much left to feed on. When he’s finished he asks if she wants to stay for awhile. She’s never been inside a place like the one they’ve come to to hunt.

 

She fed from a man who offered her drugs without thought, she accepted in a way, she feels like an addict. But, the cripple of guilt only whispers passed in the moments she has time to think about anything other than the hunger.

 

“I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

 

He shrugs. 

 

The drugs hit their peak a mile from Bethel, the plateau lasts through the lastest hours of night, she knows when it starts.

 

Sh reaches across the center console and palms him through his slacks, gives him a slow grin and traces the tight peak of a nipple through the bloody splatter spray painting her t-shirt.

 

He almost pulls over.

 

* * *

 

She dreams.

 

There’s a sermon being spoken.  _ ‘And Light, just opens up the Darkness so a person can see what’s inside.’ _ Her mother says you can’t save a life that’s not worth saving, Kate wakes up. 

 

Her mouth tastes like blood. She’s in her childhood bed, Richie sits in the corner and it’s so like another dream she had once, before he was really there.

 

Her jeans and shoes are gone and there’s blood down the front of her shirt, it fills the zeros in with red. 

 

Slither is laying next to her snoozing on the bed, she looks at the cat when she speaks.“Where are my pants?”

 

“You came in here like that and told me you wanted to sit on my face. You were a little fucked up. I used my wayob to get you to calm down and go to sleep.”

 

“You eyeball-handed me?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“I was fucked up last time too, didn’t stop you then.”

 

“I feel bad about that, it’s why I didn’t fuck you in the car, which made you mad. You keep eating druggies. You need something a little more kosher.”

 

She’s startled by the admission that he feels bad and amused by everything else. “Don’t feel bad,” she tells him.

 

He waits a long time before asking, “Do you want to?”

 

“Want to what?”

 

He creeps slowly to the edge of the bed and peels the covers down, cautious like he’s waiting for her to strike, or scream or run. She does no such thing, he stares at the milk of her thighs and licks his lips slowly, she she sees every flick of his tongue, it disturbs the cat who jumps up and rumbles from the room.

 

Her t-shirt is too short to cover anything of major importance, she tucks her knees up to her chest and keeps her legs clenched together tightly, his fingers whisper over her flanks.

 

**“** Sit on my face.”

 

“I’m not going to do that.”

 

“Aren’t you a little martyr.”

 

“Careful,” she tries to sound in charge but the word is a whisper, “you sound like your brother.”

 

His plush mouth is all over the side of her neck,“You’re so horny I can taste it.” His fangs don’t drop and he doesn’t press himself against her but she’s the one who loses, she wants him to do both.

 

It makes her feel sad, how lost she’s become, how far away from the girl she used to be. She doesn’t want to want things she spent so long believing were bad. She’s in her old room full of the things from her old life, if she were anywhere else she might say something besides, “Can I just have my pants back?”

 

He sits up from his sprawl of limbs against her, he looks hurt and sad too. He’d thought she was only pretending, it hurts to know he’s still got a little boy hoping and dreaming somewhere deep inside of him. It’s like she’s his playmate, she wishes she could be, sometimes.

 

But not now.

 

She’s left her clothes somewhere else, he gives her a pair of old sweatpants she doesn’t remember him ever wearing. 

 

He even looks away when she puts them on. She shuffles out of the room and sits on the bottom stair, she can hear him in her old room, his hand pummeling at an erection she wants to put her mouth around again, one day.

 

He cums. She stands and walks into her own room, her parents’ wedding bed, she shuts the door behind her and curls on her side with her knees pressed so tightly together her legs shake.

 

* * *

 

“What do you think Seth is doing?” she asks one night while she’s washing dishes, he dries, and shrugs. “He’s probably in mortal danger.”

 

She presses a little harder on the subject of their past lives. “What do you think Santanico is doing?”

 

“Her name is Kisa.”

 

His tone is a grumble of grumpiness, she smirks, “Did she dump you?”

 

He doesn’t answer.

 

She found a necklace once while she was cleaning out her old room; the floor had been hills of black garbage bags for goodwill dropboxes and Spring blew in softly from the open windows, he’d been putting the screens in downstairs and she’d just found it in a drawer cleared out of everything except his extra bullets and stakes.

 

He doesn’t know she’s seen it.

 

She doesn’t want to hurt him with words she can’t take back, with observations he isn’t ready to hear, she’s still a tender-hearted girl. 

 

A plate shatters against the lip of the sink, inside her gums something sends of pang of fire through her mouth.

 

“Venom block.”

 

“What is that?”

 

“When you feed after not feeding for a while.”

 

“Like you would know.”

 

“Come on, I’m not that bad. I eat to live.” He cradles her jaw between his palms. 

 

“Tanner said that I was supposed to be a substitute for Santanico. That if they sacrificed me when you released her, it’d distract the Lords because I had a pure soul.”

 

“That’s a crackjob if I’ve ever heard of one,” Richie says. “She probably just wanted to eat you. Virgins taste best, y’know?”

 

She glares at him. “I don’t. Maybe she was just saving me for after she turned you, like a present or something. So you could have a good first meal.”

 

He doesn’t bother to correct her, she still knows so little of Santanico, which is disconcerting considering her entire life was decided for her based on Santanico’s wish to be free.

 

“Come here,” he says after a moment, when her jaw locks and she feels like she can’t talk right. He reaches for her mouth and she shies away like a cranky toddler until he calms her. 

 

He uses his fingers, circles the spots that hurt. She pulls his hands away and edges up on her toes, kisses him, his tongue curls over the sore spots of her fangs, her puffy gums. A part of her is vindictive, she wants to take from the woman they all called a goddess. She sighs, it feels good. 

 

Warmth suffuses through her like being outside again during the day, when he pulls back she follows for a moment. Her eyes bring him back, but he looks stuck on some thought spiraling away from his brain into the ether.

 

They end up on the couch, a lazy push-pull of hips and mouths and it’s when she twists her neck, mouth swollen that his hips slow in the way they circle over hers, he wants to fuck, she thinks, she wants it too.  

 

It’s been hard since they came back from hunting in the city. They understand each other better than they ever have. It doesn’t make things any easier.

 

He’s gone still, his face is pinched and behind his glasses he looks perturbed.

 

“What’s wrong?”

 

“I’m not sure. I feel weird.”

 

She laughs, once, harsh and loud. “Because you only like me nice and shy?”

 

He scowls at her, she wants him to shut up and kiss her again, turnabout being fair play. She feels like they’re wasting time because who knows the next moment she’s going to lose it, when she’s going to forget feeling like an inexperienced teenager fumbling around with the hot guy after a party, feeling almost human because it’s been over a decade since she’s made out with someone, she can count on one hand the number of times she’s made out with anyone. 

 

She can’t remember if one of the times was with his brother or not, maybe it was just a fantasy, a dream. She glares at Richie and he smiles, syrup slow and she thinks he’s playing her, expects him to pull himself away at the last moment and try to make her beg.

 

She’s ready to push him off when his mouth slants over hers, tongue swift and thick and she bucks under him barely able to breathe. She shuts her eyes and touches at his shoulders, tentative, she’s not so pure but she’s not the consummate professional he claims to be either.

 

She inhales his cologne and sweat like a kid with paint fumes, it makes her dizzy and she looks up at him, traces his cheekbones with her thumbs.

 

Too quickly his weight is gone. The bulk of him rolls off her and the couch to the side and onto the floorboards, it’s thundering and she’s left only half ruined on the couch she used to watch the 700 Club on.

 

“You’re in my head,” he accuses from the floor. 

 

“What?” It’s like being punched in the gut.

 

“Your wayob. I wasn’t going to kiss you in the kitchen but you wanted me to. That time in the supermarket, you wanted to eat that little kid. And in Dallas at the bar that’s how you got that fuckhead to follow you to the back.” He sounds mad, less at her and more at himself, like he’s let something slip through the cracks.

 

She flushes and bristles, “Fuck you.” She sits up and swings her legs to stand, meaning to stomp up the stairs and work through things alone, the way she always has but his fingers circle around her wrist. 

 

“I don’t mind, but I wasn’t going to. You  _ wanted  _ me to. I thought you wanted to forget.”

 

It doesn’t sound like an accusation, he’s so sincere. She lets him bring her back down to the couch. She looks at her knees. She wants too much.

 

“I’m sorry.” He says and she looks up, not expecting the words, he’s grinning.

 

“I didn’t know I was doing it.” She tells him.

 

He lunges and his mouth is on her’s again. He wants an excuse the same way she does.  _ She wants too much. _ He looks down at her, her wayob drawing him close again, it’s dangerous. 

 

She likes being naked under him while he’s still mostly dressed, so that’s how it happens. His big hands dumping her out of her jeans and pulling her like a doll from her shirt, her feet are warm inside her socks that he neglects to peel off her.

 

She flushes, lust is acidic and thick in her belly.

 

In her hunger she’d been primeval, now she’s all Superego, she’s hyper-aware. 

 

“We can’t keep doing this,” is on her mouth as she arches her neck to meet his lips. 

 

He stops, pressed up on his elbows. She tries to pull him back down with her heels on the back of his thighs and her arms curling over his shoulders but there’s a sudden steel to his spine. 

 

“Why do you always need an excuse to fuck me?” he asks.

 

She gapes, falter. “I don’t…”

 

“Don’t,” he warns. “You keep your Christian guilt between my dick and your pussy at all times.”

 

Her limbs slacken and she goes limp under his glare. His head bobs, she squeezes her eyes shut again. “Fuck, I’m fucking sorry. Okay?” Her voice sounds painfully kiddish. She can feel his hand over her eyes. 

 

“Just tell me what you want.” He sounds world-weary like he’s doing her a favor that he doesn’t want to spend the energy on.

 

She doesn’t want anything from him  anymore in that , it all feels wrong. “I don’t know, whatever you want.” 

 

The sound he makes is strangled frustration and her nudity which seemed so vital and necessary seems vulgar now. “I’m just so confused.”

 

He scoffs and sits up, she opens her eyes but he won’t look at her, she pulls down the afghan from over the top of the couch and he rises, tossing “whatever,” at her like she’s the asshole. Her voice doesn’t sound like her own when she says his name, he stops and about-faces coming back to the couch with footsteps that drag.

 

He scowls and she puts hands over her mouth, avoids looking at him.

 

He doubles over and spews blood and bile on the wood floor and rag rug.

 

“I didn’t mean to do that.” She reaches forward where he’s retching but he pushes her hand away. He’s not done being sick. She holds her hands in fists wondering is her stare and her voice is the only thing that carries the weight of a wayob.

 

She climbs the stairs and cries in the bathtub with the shower sluicing over her back. He slams the front door when he leaves. 

 

She doesn’t see him for three long days that feel like being alone again for the first time in over a decade. Even Slither cannot console her, being alone with her thoughts with no one to talk to is clawing at her temporals.

 

She doesn’t know if he’s going to come back. 

 

He does.

 

Things get better like they always do but not before she wears sunglasses indoors for a month and answers any question he asks her with single words. He calls her Helen Keller. She asks for his help figuring out just what she can do with the special snake superpower, her sarcasm fully intact.

 

He reminds her of when she called his eyeball hand ‘rapey’ and she thinks back to every time she’s fed on a person and how they all let her get too close, or shuffled towards her. Like a cobra swaying or the distraction of a rattlesnake’s tail.

 

“You’ll have to feed steadily to control it,” he says.

 

She answers with a quiet, “I don’t know if I’m ready to do that yet.”

 

“You’re putting off the inevitable, Kate.”

 

“I want to live in denial for a little bit longer, Richie. You owe me at least that.”

 

He isn’t mad that she calls him on his bluffs, instead he sighs, rubs her shoulder softly, it’s the first time he’s touched her with kindness since he came back, she uncurls like a snake head on his knee, hair in his lap, she watches some late night travel show and tries not to cry.

 

Later over pancakes for dinner he tells her, “You just have to actively think about not using it until you have control on it. Until you start eating like a normal culebra your mind isn’t strong enough to keep it locked up. When it begins to wander keep the sunglasses on.” He flicks their lenses and she snaps with human teeth at his finger.

 

They play Monopoly afterwards and sit up for three days trying to theft each other’s Boardwalks, only stopping to feed the cat.

 

* * *

 

Spring drifts in slowly, the skies rolling with clouds. For the first time in years she’s aware of the seasons passing.

 

She’s feeds once every other month now, on low-lives, people no one will miss. She can’t quite live with it but she’s not quite alive anyways.

 

When the sun peeks out one day and shines through the windows for a few moments, she hides in the shadows and sees what a decrepit thing her childhood home has become, her mother would roll over in her grave. 

 

Richie’s gone into the city to get something or another from a Walmart, the house is empty and rotting, her one safe space, and she suddenly has to clean it, has to get rid of the nest of filth that she’s let herself fester in.

 

She scrubs every inch of the house with bleach water, her skin is melting by the end of it, it heals as she dusts and sweeps, throwing out all the bugs and hidden animal bones. 

 

It’s only when she’s cleaning her own room that she becomes strikingly aware of how many pairs underwear have gone missing over the years, it’s been an idle thought in the back of her fried brain but since she’s started eating again it’s become a real inconvenience. There’s piles of old clothes and socks on the floor where Slither sleeps happily atop them, but only three pairs of underwear. 

 

She remembers, vaguely, that she used to have at least two weeks worth of fresh pairs because her mother hated having to do laundry more than three times a month.

 

When she wanders into Richie’s room, her room, she’s surprised that he hasn’t been stealing them and hoarding them like his books. She’s seen him take a pair once, she knows. She’s also seen his soul enough times to know he’s been a panty thief since he was a teenager, has always had a fascination with them, not like he wants to wear them fascinated, but more that he finds them undeniably erotic and can’t keep his peculate hands away.

 

She digs through his drawers more than once, just in case, brows pulling together when she finds no underwear but a stationary set, an inkwell pen. There’s half a letter written to Seth, it talks about meaningless things, he never says her name.

 

Under the letter is another, but it’s one written  _ from _ Seth and sent to a P.O. box in Houston she’s never heard of, it’s vague and distant, he talks about getting old and her guts feel weird. 

 

He got remarried, actually, but it didn’t last, he sits rich and lonely most nights. He talks about a story she’s heard Richie tell about their glory days. At the end of the letter there’s a postscript calling Richie a pervert in the same sentence that thanks him for a pair of Kate’s underwear that helped him get through a dry spell. 

 

There’s no more detail than that, it’s the only time her name is mentioned, he doesn’t seem emotional about it, but she always knew he wanted her. It seems brotherly, fucked up and conspiratorial, a boys’ club of two.

 

Still, reading the account of the unknown violation of her dignity sends rage seething through her. Before Richie gets home at sundown all of his boxers are on the lawn, covered in mud. His expensive shoes and belts, too.

 

She’s surprised that it doesn’t turn into a fight, instead he walks through the door and stares where she’s sitting on the couch petting Slither, her eyes burn holes in him. “He misses you,” he says, for the first time in years she feels her heart jump in her chest.

 

“My underwear though, really?” she asks, can no longer convince herself to be as mad at his omission, something about the idea of Seth having her intimates over anyone else makes her sentimental. 

 

“He was really excited for the pink ones with little elephants on them. Said he saw you in ‘em once down in Mexico and beat off to the image for years.”

 

Her cheeks flame with innocent embarrassment, she feels like a schoolgirl again. “How flattering of him.”

 

Richie grins. “I can ask for them back.”

 

“No thanks. They’re probably stained enough they can stand on their own by now.”

 

“Yeah, probably.”

 

He looks like he wants to say more, it’s rare that he shuffles his feet, hands in pockets with his shoulders curling in.

 

“What?”

 

He looks up, intent and focused. “Do you ever wish it was you and Seth?”

 

“Seth’s selfish and he’s happier without anyone, because he wants to be King of the Hill. That’s okay as long as you don’t want to stand up there with him.”

 

He’s still staring at her.

 

She sighs and answers his question. “No, Richie.”

 

He grins.

 

“After the Twister, what else was I supposed to do? I was alone in Mexico, everyone was dead and I was still a kid. I thought Seth had all his shit together. I thought he had it all figured out.”

 

“He didn't though.”

 

“Sometimes I wish I told him it wasn’t his fault but he probably already convinced himself it was. I wasn’t the one that could get through to him, I think he wanted me to be. I think you guys saw me as something pure, in the beginning. I think you were gluttons for it.”

 

There’s a twitch to his smile, it falters, but stays as he shakes his head. “I can’t say you’re wrong, you looked shiny.”

 

“Because I wasn’t ruined yet,” she sighs. “You’re buying me new underwear, by the way.”

 

“Only if I get to pick them out.” Before she can disagree he says, “I already know your size and I’m pretty familiar with good quality, but you know that.” He taps his head, where she’s been a ghost inside of for so long.

 

She thinks he has a fair point. “Just don’t send anymore to Seth.”

 

He smirks. “No promises.”

 

* * *

 

He can hear her before dawn, what sounds like some plaintive whine is her forcing her face towards a pillow to moan. He’s curious but he’s made it a point to keep from lurking. 

 

He’s a man not a dog, he won’t beg for scraps. Just because she’s horny doesn’t mean she wants him. He’s not deaf and blind to the wants and needs of others. 

 

What Kate wants and needs is to pretend that they’ve never come together is some primal way on her kitchen floor.

 

And the almost on the couch turned them both inside out for weeks.

 

He leaves to feed, it’s still her home and privacy is hard to come by when they both walk around hearing and smelling everything there is to know about the other before they even have to voice a question, he figures he might owe her something like discretion, something to preserve what’s akin to modesty but nowhere near as sincere, willful ignorance is as common as family game night in the Fuller household.

 

Her new vitality has left her with lust that spikes so often he wonders if girls really are what the magazines say, more fuck ready than boys. It might be some kind of midlife boost. Maybe it’s just her finally getting away from the lingering circuits of her parental programming.

 

* * *

 

His things are everywhere.

 

She finds his books in the bathroom, the cupboards, his pomade sits on the vanity and reeks like his cologne, it’s pleasant but too strong, his hair in the shower, between her toes. She saw him walk out of the bathroom once, hair limp, skin pink, towel held in his fist around his waist. She’d looked away.

 

She finds a stray shirt of his when sorting the laundry, it’s got just a speckle of blood on the collar, his blood, she knows the smell, she licks at it until it’s wet, sucking the taste into her mouth. 

 

His blood always makes her horny, a fraction of his wants mixed with hers.

 

She wanders into his bedroom, her old bedroom, it’s strange to see the innocence of pre-pubescent girl soiled with a man’s things, all of these things he has brought into her old space. 

 

His suits in the closet, cufflinks on the dresser. His ties are arranged by color in a drawer, he keeps a can of shoe polish on the windowsill, sitting atop a pink cushion next to a gun that’s been taken apart so he can clean it. There are keepsakes on the shelves from his childhood, little things you can hide in pockets, tiny totems. 

 

There’s maps from his glory days with Seth, trinkets and baubles he took from Santanico, like that necklace she once found. His guns and knives, zip ties and stacks of cash, little Mexican figurines and souvenirs from all the places they’ve been. 

 

She settles herself down in the bed, his bed, her bed from when she was alive. It gives her a phantom heartbeat, she feels the blood rush south and cannot help where her hands stray. Knees opening, sweatpants pushed down. She thinks of him, of the smell and taste, the little pieces she has taken from his soul. 

 

When he first saw her she was bleeding, now when he looks she’s only ever wet for him, only ever wanton like a Danielle Steele heroine in the books her mother used to read out in the hammock on hazy Summer nights while her father barbequed.  

 

Her fingers touch but don’t push inside, she wants to be lazy about it, wants to take her time, she wonders if she wants to get caught.

 

He’s somewhere in the house, it only takes ten minutes for the hallway floor to creak outside the door. She stills as sure as she ever has, she remembers being seventeen and trying to get off in a house full of people. He toes open the door and she opens her eyes. Her old bed smells like him. She presses her face to the scent of the sheets and holds the pillow that used to be hers between her legs. 

 

The door opens wider, he makes to step in around it.

 

“Don’t.” She barely recognizes the rasp of her voice.

 

He goes still, merely observant. 

 

“Tell me this is okay.”

 

“It’s okay to make yourself feel good Kate.”

 

But it isn’t. She feels good when she kills, she feels good when she feeds.

 

“Don’t feel guilty.” 

 

Her guilt keeps her company. Her guilt keeps her human.

 

She moves like a snake, his eyes turn yellow, he watches observantly as she cums humping the pillow he rests his head on. 

 

It’s like he’s inspecting a painting and waiting to give his critique, instead he crawls quietly into bed next to her and they settle into sleep without touching each other, it reminds her of the nights she spent with his brother down in Mexico, she wakes before he does and slips out of bed like a ghost in the hours of early morning.

 

* * *

 

If they had ever gone to school together they might have sat next to each other in a yearbook. The end of the F’s and the beginning of the G’s.

 

There are old school photos in the china cabinet, she’s turned them all facedown.

 

One day he absentmindedly sets them upright, pictures of her and her classmates, she looks younger, unwise, her eyes sparkle and her hair is not dull, there's no hollowness of starvation. 

 

There's annual school photos of her and Scott from kindergarten to their last days together as a complete family. He watches her age from a chubby faced girl with too-wide eyes into a smiling pre-teen with braces, her brother looks depressed in every photo but she doesn't, there's ones of her with friends at church functions, she wears a modest dress and laugh, the one where a boyfriend took her to junior prom has his arm around her waist but there's a solid three inches between him, she was a good girl before they ruined her, Seth and Carlos and Scott, Santanico and Malvado, the Lords and himself. They've all caused her to wilt.

 

He wonders if they ever would've said a word to each other if they’d shared a class in third period Chemistry, he was shy as a teenager, all gangly limbs and four eyes. Seth stood up for him, the girls liked that. Kate probably would've liked that too, she's a protector, she likes to fix things. At least she used to, now he wonders if she’ll turn to stone most days.

 

She's always so far gone from him, he wishes he could have some kind of grasp on her. 

 

It's less like when he lost Kisa and more like missing out on who Kate would've been.

 

* * *

 

She goes out and she hunts, he waits up like an older brother hoping to catch her with a hickey.

 

“It’s almost past curfew.”

 

“Thirty-five year olds don’t have curfews, especially on their birthdays .”

 

His pupils blow behind his glasses. “Holy shit.”

 

“It’s so messed up.”

 

“Do you feel any older?”

 

“Dying at a certain age is like being born in a certain decade.”

 

“It’s because you’re a millennial.”

 

“And you’re Peter fucking Pan.” She hates that term,  _ millennial _ , it’s useless to her, she has not aged in over a decade, nearly two, she has no need for a label anymore.

 

“You know I think Seth rubbed off on you, you’ve got a dirty mouth and you’re a messy eater.” 

 

He gets up way too close, in her personal space as usual, he touches a blood stain on the collar of her shirt, lets his fingers trail down until they’re cupping the crimson fabric around her breasts, he thumbs her nipple and she tries not to shiver from the thrill it sends firing through her neurons.

 

“I do dumb things when I’m starving, what’s your excuse?”

 

“You eat like you fuck. You’re repressed.” His head bows and his lips carve over her temple, the shell of her ear.

 

“I can’t just do it and not feel guilty about it.”

 

“You  _ like _ the guilt, it’s what gets you off.”

 

She hides her face in her shoulder. “Shut up.”

 

“Eventually you’re going to get so sick of this bullshit you’ll get honest and ask me to go slow and be real sweet and  _ I’ll  _ make you promise to do all kinds of things and you won’t want to say yes, but you will anyway.”

 

She doesn’t want to admit that she knows he’s right, she’s given into the temptation already but keeps going back on her word, pulls the jail card on herself, do not collect real estate, do not pass go. But, he’s an infection that has circulated inside her body, he makes her limbs weak and pummels down her defenses.The serpent who stole all of Eve’s rental property. She doesn’t understand if it’s a certain magnetism the Gecko brothers have, if she’s always been so subdued that the idea of fucking a criminal is like an addiction to her.

 

“You’re an adult now. You don’t have to live up to anything but you still can’t admit that it’s not fucking normal to pretend you’re upset over old shit. You act like you should be praying before you go to sleep or that you did bad because you really liked having my dick inside of you.”

 

Outside, the front porch creeks under someone stepping up to the door, she hears the click of spurs on black cowboy boots. “Someone’s here.”

 

It’s as if they’ve both flipped a switch, they pull back and their tones change and they are both ready to kill for the moment when they don’t know who is standing at the door.

 

It fades.

 

Kate can smell Maggie’s perfume and the leather of a black jacket.

 

Richie glances towards the front of the house, his expression is a disappointed scowl. “Fucking white hat motherfucker.”

 

She answers the door and Freddie stands on the other side, he looks so much older and she realizes how terribly she’s missed him.

 

His wise eyes take her in and he looks almost relieved, she’s been feeding, she looks like her old self even at a cost. But then a dark shadow looms up behind her back, Freddie’s eyes glance up and old resentment washes across his face, he puts his hand on his hip reaching for his gun.

  
“Howdy, Ranger,” Richie says at her back, she can hear the shit-eating grin in his voice.

 

 

 

 


	4. Scheherzade

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a 14k chapter, hence the delay. Me and Hasitsclaws have already started the next chapter and I'm trying to convince her into another collab. Also, it should be obvious by now but we love smut. So there's a lot here.

Her kitchen table feels smaller with two grown men sitting at it. She puts her palms under her thighs to keep from picking at her cuticles.  Freddie is looking at her but she keeps her eyes down, staring at the vinyl placemat trying not to scrape dried crumbs from it. This is a lot more awkward than the family dinners she used to share at this table years ago.

 

“How long has he been here?” His tone is ice, she’d had to push him off the porch to keep him from shooting Richie in the heart on instinct. It’d taken five minutes of showdown staring just to get Freddie to holster his weapon.

 

Richie’s legs stretch out under the table, hands in his pockets and shoulders relaxed, she catches herself staring and looks back down, dutifully trying to avoid the conversation Freddie seems intent on having; the cat will not come anywhere near him.

 

“ _I’ve_ been here for about seven years,” Richie says matter of factly.

 

Freddie scowls and leans into the table, hands flat and eyes steely, he feels lied to, she feels guilt for a fleeting moment, but Freddie’s _not supposed to be here_ . “And what exactly _are_ you doing here?”

 

It’s not right that he’s just shown up and she realizes, slowly and with careful consideration that she’s angry about it. “Freddie, why are _you_ here?”

 

“I was worried, and Seth asked me, Santanico too. They’ve been working together.”

 

Richie doesn’t miss a beat. “He’s got youngest child complex, he wants what other people have and then gets mad that it’s all hand me downs.”

 

Freddie barely blinks. “Pot calling the kettle black.”

 

The gasp that flies from her mouth is some involuntary thing that Freddie startles from, Richie raises his brows, a smirk dancing somewhere behind his lip. She can’t help but cover her surprise with a glare and her mouth shuts with a click of teeth. Her face heats and she doesn’t know what to say, it hurts worse than she thought it could to have someone think of her as the type of girl she always used to pity and hate.

 

When he looks at her he’s surprised too, at her reaction, at her discomfort. “Why’d you make that face?”

 

She doesn’t have the words to recover, and Richie’s eyes are rolling almost completely out of his head from the sound of his sigh.

 

She’s misunderstood Freddie’s meaning.

 

“He didn’t mean it like that Katie-Cakes.”

 

She nearly stops breathing and Freddie, all at once, understands. “Holy shit, you two are sleeping together.”

 

She sputters, her face is a mask of guilt.

 

Richie laughs around a cigarette filter, lighting it after he’s adds, “Well, duh”

 

“Shut up, Richie,” she hisses, he’s making it worse.

 

Freddie blocks his eyes with his palms. “Ah, fuck, I’m never gonna get that image outta my head now.”

“You thinking about us naked?” Richie smirks.

 

She kicks him under the table, he winks at her, his calf rubbing along the line of her leg as Freddie shakes his head in horrified disgust.

 

She wonders if he felt this way when Billy started dating, they’d never talk about her boyfriends on the phone because he says he’s never liked any of them. He’s been her substitute father a long time, she knows it’s because he feels like he has to. But, he’d never had to worry about boys with her, she’s been shut up in her moth-ridden house for years, alone, celibate, now the hardest thing is to have him look at her with some mournful expression, like she’s betrayed him.

 

At least he doesn’t have to worry about teenage pregnancy with her, she thinks abstractly.

 

“So you talk to Seth and Santanico?” she finally asks, another secret that’s been kept from her.

 

He seems shy in his answer. “From time to time.

“I talk to my brother, too,” Richie says, she thinks about the underwear incident and blushes involuntarily. “He didn’t mention anything about a threat.”

 

“He didn’t want to worry you,” Freddie says, a lame excuse. “At first we didn’t think it was a problem, but you must be seeing the news. Everything south of Texas is turning into blood and dust.”

 

“How many times have people played hero and it hasn’t worked?” Kate asks, she thinks about her demise and laughs, hollowly. “The world is full of bad, Freddie. Maybe it has to be.”

 

He looks at her like he doesn’t know her. “How can you say that, Kate? Not everyone deserves to suffer, there are good people, _innocent_ peop…-”

 

“There are no innocents,” Richie defends, she looks at him for it, he does not look at her. “Everyone’s a sinner, Ranger.”

 

“Not children,” Freddie says, she knows he means it because he is a father and feels it at his core.

 

She stays silent.

 

“So what are you really here for, Ranger?” Richie finally asks. “Why’d my brother send you to break the bad news instead of just telling me?”

 

Freddie is silent a long moment before he finally says, “Defeating the Lords didn’t come without consequence. They paid tribute to their gods, one of them is mad. Really fucking mad. Santanico thought it was just residual energy, things settling, until she started having dreams.”

  
“Who’s the baddie, exactly? And please don’t say it’s another stripper, because I’m seriously over that shit,” Richie scoffs.

 

Kate rolls her eyes so hard that they rattle in their sockets, she wishes they’d fall out on the floor and roll to his feet so he’d get her point.

 

For his part, Freddie simply sighs and continues, “The Lords were like his children and since you, your brother and Santanico technically took ‘em out, he wants revenge. He wants the world to suffer and everything is tearing apart at the seams because he wills it. We need your help.”

 

“Give us some time to think it over.”

 

“That’s all I’m asking.”

 

Kate snorts, then scoffs, “Sure.”

 

“It’s late, you mind if I stay? I promise not to stake Richie in his sleep.” He holds his hand over his heart like he’s taking a solemn pledge.

 

Richie only rolls his eyes, smiling all the same but trying to hide it.

 

Scott’s room has gone unused, it’s the only place she has to offer Freddie and he looks confused by the notion, some discomfited mix of relief but uneasiness.

 

“I dust in here sometimes, but that’s it.”

 

“Where is Richie going to sleep?”

 

“This isn’t where he sleeps. I gave him my old room. I’ve got some errands to run, but you know the cell number if you need me.”

 

She leaves him slightly uncomfortable at the idea of where Richie sleeps, she doesn’t feel bad, this whole situation is as awkward as she’d thought it be if Freddie ever showed up unannounced and found a Gecko in her home; it doesn’t help that he’s come asking for her to face a past she does not want to remember  for a world she does not care about.

* * *

 

 

He’s standing on the back porch, she sees him walk down the back steps. She follows. He slows down so she might catch up. The hot flare of aggression edging towards lust from before Freddie started pointing his firearm at Richie has cooled, it remains as something coalesced into a brittle awareness of his body and his voice and the way he moves.

 

His shoulders are pulled tight with tension, she stares at the space between them and wishes she wasn’t still so mad at him, if she wasn’t she could reach out and smooth hands over the fabric, put her forehead against his spine and say something like ‘I’m sorry.’

 

It’s not just him she’s mad at.

 

The walk down deserted houses that look like dead faces, broken windows and missing front doors is quiet. The summer hums with power lines and cicadas.

 

He holds out for three quarters of a mile before he asks, “Are we going to talk about it?”

 

“I don’t want to worry about that now. Freddie will tell us what’s really going on soon, he just wants to make sure I’m really _okay_.”       

 

He’s smirking again when she looks askance. “I meant are we going to talk about what we really left the house for.”

 

She shrugs. “You were sneaking out to feed.”

 

“And you didn’t?”

 

“I just wanted to get out of the house.”

 

He stops walking, hands shoved down into his pocket, rocking on his heels when she turns and glares. He leans forward towards her and whispers, “Bullshit,” like it’s a prelude to something.

 

She rocks back, “Excuse me?”

 

“Bull. Shit. You _might_ have wanted to get out and go think about what he said on your own, but I doubt you’d tag along with me for that.”

 

“What?”

 

“You like to watch me feed, you do it whenever we go out.”

 

His face shines, glimmers of hope and expectation crease the skin around his eyes and she knows what he wants. He wants to poke at her half-healed wounds and see if she’ll snarl. She tries her best to look offended but her laugh of surprise comes out as false as it is forced. “I do not do that.”

 

“It turns you on, not just because it’s me, because there is that, but it’s also because you really just enjoy feeding.” He sighs, starts walking again, leaving her behind, “You act like such a little girl sometimes, you know that?”

 

She tries not to stomp or cross her arms as she walks and keeps pace, half mumbles when they’re in step with each other again, “What do you want, Richie?”

 

“I want you to stop acting like this.” His tone is friendly, a suggestion, there’s nothing hiding in it. “You don’t have to hide it, you can just ask. You can do whatever you want to do, Kate. Try it some time, it’s nice to be a grown-up.” His tone smolders and half of her wants to laugh in his face, the other wants to press up close.

 

“You sound _just_ like your brother.”

 

He laughs and looks to where the sun sits in the sky during the daytime.

* * *

 

 

They arrive home hours later.

 

The Ranger is asleep and snoring upstairs.

 

She walks quietly at his side, she lets him hold her hand like Kisa never would. It lets him experience the high school memories he lost out on, the simple bits of intimacy she almost grudgingly gives him.

 

She watched quietly as he fed, some nameless dealer in the once holy town now filled with soucriants. But when he turned to her, mouth shiny red, she did not dismiss him this time, she simply told him to wipe his face off, she wanted to go get ice-cream from the gas station down the street.

 

He cleaned himself up and bought her a strawberry shortcake bar, the middle aged clerk behind the counter looked at them with discomfort, opposites pressed together in the middle of the night, him in a suit and her in Daisy Dukes and a tank top, her hair’s grown long again, she puts it back in a braid and it makes her look younger.

 

That gave him a secret thrill, he likes that people think he’s the violator and underestimate her.

 

She’s got strawberry stains around her mouth, he stops at the lip of the kitchen and pulls her in to kiss her softly, she turns her head at first, always in denial.

 

He huffs. “Please, Katie,” he knows she likes it when he begs.

 

She kisses him back softly while he tugs gently on her braid, he walks her to bed and she touches his cheek goodnight; Slither brushes past his ankles and slips inside as she closes the door, he smiles because at first he wasn’t totally sure if she’d kill the cat or not.

 

It’s the first time in a long time she has not been venomous, he wonders if the Ranger’s proximity makes her naturally kinder.

 

He goes to his room, her room, and sits, listening to the stillness of the house. She is lying in bed already, he waits for her to fall asleep before taking out his phone and hitting one on speed dial.

 

After the third ring there’s an answer, shuffling, a sleepy irritated demand of, “Do you have any fucking idea what fucking _time it is_?”

 

“Hello to you too, brother.”

 

“What the fuck, Richie?”

 

“The Ranger showed up.”

 

The other line is quiet for a moment; the anger in Seth’s tone is gone when he says, “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I didn’t want you to think I did it to cop a feel on your ex, or something.”

 

“I thought you wouldn’t go anywhere near her again?”

 

He sighs. “I did, too. But a couple of months ago I was on a trip to Mexico and, fuck, Richie, it’s a mess down there. I knew it wasn’t natural. I started looking into stuff and gave the Ranger a call, he’s been keeping up with Santanico and they filled me in on the latest angry Mayan God who wants our asses on a plate.”

 

“You actually wanna do something about it?” he scoffs, when has that ever gotten them anywhere but in more shit. “Santanico can handle this on her own, she’s never needed us, we’ve always been playing pieces, this isn’t our fight.”

 

“It is when our names are on the hit list.”

 

“Kate’s isn’t.”

 

Seth is quiet again for a long moment. “...We think this guy had something to do with Scott.”

 

“Freddie said you only found ashes.”

 

“Yeah, well I guess the good Ranger lied to spare the princess nightmares about it. He was alive for weeks after they got him.”

 

Anger swells inside of him, he feels irrationally protective, he’s taken care of her better than his brother can claim to have done, better than the Ranger who’s pretended the weariness in her voice was loneliness instead of hunger over half-hearted phone calls between diaper changes or shifts at the station.

 

“So what, you’re going to drag her into this on an assumption and the guise of vengeance? Do you know how fucking long it’s taken me to even get her to _eat_ ? How dead she was when I found her, really dead, starving away to madness, the memory of the little preacher’s daughter you stroke it to at night is gone, Seth. She’s _thirty-five years old_ . It doesn’t matter that she doesn’t look it, she’s older, she’s hollow and she’s still _hungry_. She doesn’t have the strength to fight, getting her to feed is still like pulling teeth.”

 

“I need you here, with us.”

 

“...”

 

“But if you’re so wrapped up in your domestic bliss up in Texas maybe you shouldn’t come.”

 

“That’s no…-”

 

“Goodbye, Richard.”

 

The other line goes dead, he’s left seething on the edge of the bed. When he was younger, life was always about the thrill; now he just wants some quiet. Kate isn’t exactly a one-way ticket to paradise, but he knows her, simple interaction is easy, it always has been. This small existence they live waiting out the storm is preferable to all the bullshit he put up with before this.

 

Except his brother’s name is on that list; nevermind his is, too. He can handle himself, but Seth… He’s so old now. The newest big bad could be the Lords on steroids for all they know, and Seth doesn’t deserve to die that way, not alone, at least, not without him.

 

He doesn’t have a clue how he could explain this to her though, she’s still going to feel abandoned; she hasn’t forgiven him for the last time so the chances of her letting it go now are slim.

 

He’s good at math, the risk isn’t worth it either way.

* * *

 

 

Freddie wakes at seven a.m. sharp and wanders down to the kitchen where she’s already made them pancakes and bacon, fresh coffee and orange juice. She’s told Richie to make himself scarce, that if Freddie finds one flaw in her he’ll never leave out of responsibility.

 

“Hey,” she says, handing him a mug and pointing towards cream and sugar at the table.

 

“Thank you,” he smiles, waits as she makes him a plate before serving herself. When she’s settled he takes a bite and compliments the cooking before getting into the hard stuff. “Is he manipulating you?”

 

She shakes her head. “He tried, at first, but only because I wouldn’t let him into the house for three months.”

 

“What finally made you open the door?” He seems so unbelieving she’d do it of her own will.

 

She shrugs. “I was lonely.”

 

A hint of guilt weighs on his shoulders as he eats a too-big bite just to fill his mouth. Slither wraps around her legs under the table and she rubs the feline with her foot while she waits for the silence to stall.

 

“Are you happy?” he asks, he seems so very worried about it, like she’s a responsibility he forgot, though she was never his to mind in the first place.

 

“My family is dead and I was never a career criminal who could just start a new life with some new identity. I’m dependent on one of the people who ruined my life. But, I’m not dead yet.” Her tone, careful and hushed doesn’t hide much, Freddie has always been smart, perceptive, he can read between the lines. She wouldn’t have survived alone forever.

 

“But that doesn’t mean you’re happy,” he sighs. “It just means you’re breathing, but it doesn’t seem like you even want to do that.”

 

“I’ve lost everything, Freddie.”

 

He flinches. “I’m sorry.”

 

She catches his gaze and looks at him very solemnly. “It’s not something you need to apologize for. You got roped in just like my family and me, and it’s turned your life to hell because of it.”

 

“Because of _them_ ,” Freddie hisses, mindful of Richie somewhere in the house, listening in. “Because of those fucking Geckos.”

 

“But now you want to help them?”

 

“I don’t have much of a choice,” Freddie says.

 

“There’s always a choice.”

 

“Copping out would leave the world defenseless, Kate. I know it seems desolate to you, but I’ve got a family. I’m gonna be a grandpa soon.”

 

She reels back in shock, he hadn’t mentioned that during their last call. He can read the confusion on her face and explains, “I just found out a couple of days ago. Billy’s been seeing a guy for awhile.” His smile makes him look younger but he seems to remember where he is again and his smile fades, “I should’ve taken better care of you.”

 

“It’s never been your job.”

 

“You were just a child.”

 

The happy chime of his phone interrupts the opening she might insert an answer into, in truth it only keeps the silence she’d give him int return from fully blossoming.

 

“Sorry, Kate.” And he rises to take the call outside on the back porch.

 

The second floor creaks and she knows it’s Richie settling into bed, he’s come in and stayed out of sight before the sun rose, while Freddie was still asleep, she could smell the blood on him but stayed under her covers and listened to him mount the stairs slowly, like he’d been giving her a chance to follow if she’d wanted.

 

The muffled answers of half a conversation filter through her broodiness. Freddie is leaning on the railing of the porch, it groans woodenly.

 

“That’s great! Friday night! My goodness. Well, you’re gonna have to keep practicing if you want to beat your sister’s record. Put mom on, okay, I love you. Yeah, yuck! Hey...how’s Billy? Well, of course it’s hard, yeah, yeah. She wanted to go away to school, we both let her. I don’t know, send her the coffee maker, the old one, under the sink, yeah, you can boil water in that. I saw it on the internet. She’ll survive her first roommate. What time is Marie’s concert? Do we have to stay for all of the grades? What? We can just sneak out. Quickie in the parking lot. I’ll be there. Late. Yeah, tonight, but probably not before they leave for school. I’ll sleep when I get in. Okay, call your mother, okay, I said it was fine. Know, not sarcastic, smartass. I love you. Yeah, love you, drive me crazy tho-hey! Okay, Bye bye.”

 

She thinks he’s an idiot for throwing himself into the fire again when he has so much to live for. She leaves the table before he comes back inside and disappears behind her bedroom door.

* * *

 

 

Freddie gets her out of the house by cornering Richie and telling him what he thinks is best for her.

 

He’s wrong, she doesn’t want to be around people. People are food.

 

They end up at a steakhouse that has seen better economic climes and more enthusiastic waitresses. It’s nice to be out but it’s hard to overcome the presence of guilt and obligation that cloak and cloud Freddie.

 

Richie has stayed silent the entire drive, Freddie had taken his own truck and she’d been left to try to pretend the silence between them was normal. They sit next to each other, he doesn’t like being so close to the wall but she makes him take it anyway because she’s feeling spiteful. The way warmth of him seeps into her bare skin through his slacks, his big thigh pressing alongside hers is some stilted sort of foreplay.

 

Freddie hasn’t stopped looking sour over learning about their current state of existence as something not quite a couple, as something more and less than such a simple explanation of two people sharing beds and space and some semblance of a life.

 

As Freddie orders, knuckles ghost from the hem of her dress and down around the hard knob of her knee, the waitress looks down at her expectantly and she’s forgotten what she wants.

 

He smiles at her when Freddie isn’t looking and she feels moony, like a little girl hanging a poster on her wall of some teenage dream.

 

She pushes the hot sauce bottle at him with the back of her hand and stares at the raw meal on her plate, her ankle is bare and the hem of his slacks chafe when she wraps it around his calf. She rubs the top of her naked foot down curve of muscle she can feel underneath, her flip flop gaping off her heel.

 

It’s comforting to touch another person, to be allowed something like that.

 

Freddie talks but she can ignore most of it.

 

She wants to tell Richie she’s sorry for ignoring _him_. She knows it’s not easy, The Ranger is the only unsevered connection to both of their old lives that they have left.

 

After dinner, before she slips into the passenger side of the shiny, black monstrosity he still drives around, Richie presses her tightly up against the door frame, handle in the small of her back, teether clicking on hers, firm and trying to tell her something, but she doesn’t know what. He’s hard to decipher sometimes.

 

Freddie is watching them in his rearview mirror while he’s idling in the parking lot exit.

* * *

 

 

He’s dropped her off and stayed in the car, telling her he wanted to drive for awhile, making an excuse about the engine needing it, a funny sound he’d been hearing, that he’d be back soon.

 

She’s not home when he returns.

 

He isn’t the only one who likes to be alone sometimes, she doesn’t like feeding in front of him either, like a girl on a date who has to order a salad instead of the onion rings and half-pound burger.

 

A drawer on her old dresser squeals as it’s opened, he’s meant to soap the edges for the longest time but never follows through. The Ranger does not hear him in the hall and only just starts to turn once the door to her old bedroom is open all the way.

 

He shoves his hands in his pockets and raises a brow at the Ranger. “You gonna go through my underwear drawer now too?”

 

Freddie doesn’t look sheepish or guilty about going through someone else’s things, he must do it all the time, two daughters and a few decades in law enforcement have made him something of a criminal mind.

 

“I didn’t really believe it when she said you slept in here.”

 

“Well I do,” he says, smirks, “most nights.” He wants to see how many buttons the Ranger has left to push.

 

“You’re not good for her.”

 

He scoffs, “What, you her father now?”

 

“Someone has to be.”

 

He steps closer, leans in, smiles wides, “Sometimes she calls me daddy.”

 

The instinct is reflexive, the ranger steps up, a breath away from smashing his face in. “Watch your mouth, Gecko.”

 

“I’ll be nice,” he smirks, his hands go up in mock surrender. “She’d be mad if I ruin this.”

 

“Don’t act like you actually care about her.”

 

“Oh, but I do. I care about her right now when she’s mad and not talking to me and I care about her when she lets me spread her out in her parents bed.”

 

“You know, I’d shoot you in the head if it wouldn’t make a mess she’d have to clean.”

 

He leaves Freddie to his tepid examinations of his dresser drawers and finds Kate at the bottom of the stairs, he makes to go by but her fingers leash his wrist and don’t let go. “You know, one time Seth and I were on a beach in Mexico and he was trying to teach me how to pick-pocket. A vendor mistook us for a father and daughter on vacation, and when Seth asked me if I wanted a double-scoop of ice-cream I said, ‘yes, daddy,’ and he got a boner. I thought it was kinda hot, so maybe we can try it sometime.”

 

There’s blood on her breath.

* * *

 

 

The next morning Freddie sets to leave before the sun rises, he asks them one more time for their help, and again, they deny him.

 

His face heats in anger and bewilderment and Kate knows he had thought he’d convinced her, or that she’d simply been putting up some fight for show. She pities him a little for it.

 

“Why won’t you help? This involves the two of you like it does the rest of us. We made our beds, we have to lie in them!”

She’s snide when she answers because she cannot help it, the resentment still stings her, there is venom in her gums, swelling around where her wisdoms used to be before she got them taken out at sixteen, she wishes she still had vicodin to calm her. “No, _you_ two made your beds. I got dragged in with you. I didn’t ask to save the world.”

 

“You would’ve wanted to, once,” Freddie says, trying to appeal to any semblance of humanity still inside of her.

 

“I don’t owe anyone anything.” It’s the final nail in the coffin to solidify to him that she isn’t anywhere close to the girl she used to be.

 

She can tell he wants to say more, but there’s guilt holding his tongue back, he feels like he played a part in her downfall and doesn’t want to ask for more, she won’t tell him otherwise because she wants to be left alone about the world she’s not a part of now.

 

Freddie turns his attention on Richie. “What about you?”

 

He shrugs, nonchalant. “I just don’t wanna go.”

* * *

 

 

For a month things are stagnant again. Sometimes he expands on her cinematic education with a new film, heist or foreign, classic or new wave and she learns a little bit more about him, the subtle unspoken parts of him or the obvious manifestations of his bank robber persona.

 

Sometimes she show and tells the parts of her life before Mexico, before being a hostage, or a prodigal daughter returned home, but the parts of her life before he arrived in it like a crash landing are pallid and grey, she’s been alive in the aftermath for as much as she had before it.

 

They spend long days inside when summer drags on, the heat making them sleepy, making their blood hot, she fights to find distractions to keep the distance up, home improvements, macrame she’s learning through back copies of better homes and gardens brought up from a box in the basement, watching Slither stalk the house, scrubbing mold out of the corners and waving a fan made out of cereal box tops to keep cool like an old lady in church

 

Some nights, they roam the empty streets like ghosts, stepping into fallen down living rooms and climbing the stairs in other people’s old houses, sometimes he brings her things, sometimes he shows her receipts to prove he’s actually bought them instead of stealing them.

 

He’s bought her new underwear.

 

Most of it plain, the kind she likes, generic discount store cotton with nylon hems and little pink bows on the front. But, there’s a few he’s snuck in that are worth a fortune, she looked up the labels on his phone. They’re silky and skimpy, less of underwear and more of stilted foreplay when she wears them on laundry days. She won’t ever tell him that they fit like they were made for her but she thinks he already knows.

 

Now summer edges closer to fall and they stand under harsh fluorescents in Walmart and try not to cringe at the herd of unfortunates, obese or degenerate, he pushes a cart and she fills it with essentials, he frowns over shampoo bottle labels, fretting about toxicity ratings he’s reading from a naturopathica magazine in the pharmacy aisle that’s open in the child’s seat of the cart.

 

“It’s not like it matters,” she reminds, and he only frowns and holds out the shampoo bottle to her, complaining that he doesn’t like ocean breeze, “You should smell like flowers.”

 

“Like a funeral?”

 

“Like geraniums or chamomile.” He grins as they roll past the toy bright colors of condom boxes, he points a thumb, “Did you know lubricant is toxic?”

 

“No, but thank you for elucidating me on the matter.”

 

His smirk is something dirty as he leans over the handrail of the cart, she lets him leer, refusing to ask why he keeps smirking at her at first but forty-five seconds later she folds. “What?”

 

“I was just thinking it doesn’t really matter, about lube. You’ve got not problem getting all sloppy wet.”

 

She doesn’t mean to choke on spit but she does and he rounds the edge of the aisle and starts up the next one. She follows and tries to pick a hairbrush with all it’s bristles and plastic rounds still in place.

 

He’d dodged her old one when she’d thrown it at him during some argument about his books on the floor again and it’d broken against the door jam.

 

She’s trying to decide between aquamarine and lavender when he starts playing with the contents of the display.

 

“There’s something fucked up about hairbrushes.”

 

She casts a glance around the aisle before she says, “Excuse me?” It’s only them in front of thirty different colors and styles of brush.

 

“All the handles looks like weird dicks.”

 

Her mouth gapes.

 

“They look like dildos.”

 

“I’ve never really thought of it that way,” she says, crinkles her nose now that she really looks. “Well, which one seems the most versatile then?”

 

He laughs, genuinely, it makes her cheeks heat, she feels like a teenager with her crush again. “The pink one with the bubble end, more texture is better.”

 

She rolls her eyes and plops his choice in the cart, they both can’t control their sideways grins, other customers stare.

 

“I really like your hair, y’know,” he says while she continues shopping; his fingers ghost at the end of her braid and up, then down again the backs of his fingers making her shiver.

 

“Thank you,” she says.

 

“I wanna brush it when we get home.”

 

“Why?”

 

“I just want to. It’s soft.”

 

“Really?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

She feels off put about him asking at first, so benign a request that from someone of his obtuse character it strange enough to be disconcerting. But then he looks at her with a small pout and he knows he’s hooked her, she tries to shake her head and look away but he smiles because he’s won.

 

They drive home listening to Styx, which she tries not to complain about too much. When the groceries are put away he corrals her to the floor in front of the couch, sits on the cushions with her shoulders between his knees and undoes the hair tie at the end of her braid. She can feel his eagerness through his thoroughness, unweaving the strands with precision.

 

He brushes her hair out, sans brush dildo jokes. It’s intimate and soft. He’s gentle, rubbing fingers over her scalp and around her ears, thumbs pressing into the aches of her neck and forcing them loose with a smooth excited circling that makes her sigh and hang her head.

 

Her eyes are half-shut. “It’s almost seven, I’m tired.” She’s tired even if every inch of skin is awake from the frisson of his touch.

 

He leads her to her bed and climbs in behind her, knees tucked under hers and hands left open on the bed next to her for her to slip in her own. He exhales on her skin and it’s nice to let him hold her for awhile without any expectation in it.

 

He doesn’t seem to be concerned about how firmly he’s pressed his hard-on against her backside, he noses at her nape and flattens a hand on her ribs.

 

She whispers even though the room is brightening with morning not hiding behind the curtains, “Richie.”

 

He hums and nudges his hips closer.

 

“Your belt is stabbing me and I want to take off my sweater.”

 

He sounds far too amused, “Should I take off my pants?”

 

He lets her loose and she shifts onto her back to watch him climb out of bed, missing his well-fed body’s heat the moment it’s not against her anymore. He strips down to his boxer-briefs and she bridges up to shimmy her pants down, arches to pull her sweater free from under her shoulders.

 

He prowls back between the covers like something from the jungle and she wriggles closer to slot them back together again. The fine hair of his thighs tickles against her backside and he thumbs her spine.

 

“Are you going to sleep in your bra?”

 

He undoes her bra smoothly, with precision, she wants to ask him for a moment if he used to practice on stuffed animals in high scool but then his fingers are ghosting over the edge of her breast, he tweaks softly at a nipple with his fingertips and it’s sharp sensation, but it’s weighed down under the fog of her mind.

 

“I really am tired.”

 

His laugh is smothered on the nape of her neck. “Sure, if you say so.”

 

Her sleepy command of: “Be good” is taken with another measure of chuckling.

 

“I’ll keep it over your undies. Promise.”

* * *

 

 

She thinks the world has finally forgotten about them again.

 

Then, one night, when it is hot and the moon is dark, there is suddenly a snake in her bed. The rasp of it against the bedskirt she’d mistaken for the cat and before she might think of something to do there are fangs puncturing through the flesh of her calf like her mama’s sewing machine through felt. Scales roll heavily across her ankle.

 

Venom washes through her like a car in summer with rolled up windows and the snake writhes up the line of her leg, curling over the bend of her knee and up between her thighs through the loose leg of her bed shorts, she’s awake in an instant but still asleep, she can’t move.

 

The snake moves over the most intimate parts of her and she shudders, her legs are limp, open,  her insides flutter, clutch wetly, her fear and sudden lust are friends and dreams make the danger of it seem far away from her bed.

 

It nudges up against her naked sex and she feels filthy and there’s itchy heat between her shoulderblades, hackles rising and instincts coming to life. It moves over her navel and the weight of it rolling between her thighs opens her up. She flushes and tries to thrash.

 

It feels good, but it feels too real for her to turn shameless. It’s closing the distance and slickness slips over its scales. She chokes and the pitch edges up towards a sound she doesn’t make when it’s just her hand.

 

The cotton of her tank top bulges and a forked tongue flicks at the curve of her breast before the serpent's head peaks out of her shirt from between her cleavage, she can’t say a word.

 

It rests on her sternum, heavy for a creature so much smaller than she is. The venom is already half what it was pumping through her, a temporary edge over her and she writhes when the snake moves, tries to twist away with shoulders and hips but it lunges for her mouth when she opens it on a breath, her cry is half a gag but she can’t turn away as it slithers inside, she chokes on its head, it forces its way down, down, down into her guts, until its tail flicks the roof of her mouth and she swallows.

 

The serpent curls happily inside of her and floods her memories.

 

The Culebra Queen slips into her mind as effortlessly as she slipped into Richie’s. Kate wonders who was the easier of them.

 

“Hello, Katherine.” The woman with lipstick and nails the same color of old scabs says from the foot of the bed where she perches, her posture perfect and her hair shining. She shuts her eyes and tilts her head as if she is listening to something, “ _Katie-cakes.”_ She purrs. Her eyes opening and giving Kate’s glare only half a glance, “Does he call you that?”

 

“They call you Kisa now or is it still Diosa?”

 

The women who used to be called Santanico Pandemonium smirks and suddenly Kate’s whole body prickles with the start of heat, like stage lights hot on her body, lust and craving, in her mind she is looking down at Richie, licking at a goddesses’ feet. She sees herself sitting to the side of the stage with mouth dropped open.

 

Kate’s mouth opens now. And snaps shut, angry, half stuck to the bed still.

 

Her unwanted guest shifts closer, moving up the side of the bed, finger nails tapping over Kate’s ankle as she resettles.“Richard told you my name?” She smiles like she’s pleased. “You can call me Santanico if you want…” She pauses for an answer, Kate has none. “You want a lot of things, niña, you’re still so young.” It does not sound like a compliment.

 

“There’s still so much you haven’t gotten to feel.” That sounds like an insult.

 

“You’re beautiful Kate.” It feels like she’s being coddled with soft, kind words.

 

Kate knows that having to play Santanico Pandemonium for long years trapped in the Twister has made the girl who used to be Kisa a master of manipulation. Kate thinks with the sharp clarity of rage that that’s why it was so easy to work her way around Richie’s spine, how he and her got along so well for as long as they did, until they both found out the other was playing parts. They are both charming in the easy way sociopaths or psychopaths must be charming, when they need to be.

 

Santanico is beautiful as sin, it makes her infectious. Richie is as necessary as a hand to hold, it makes him easy to idolize.

 

Kate scoffs and suddenly feels as itchy as if she’s walked through a patch of poison oak. The frisson of proximity to something as old as Santanico, as old as Kisa makes her skin tingle while it’s crawling.

 

The petty hate rises up quickly, she wants to be catty, feeling like a teenager again she remembers gossipping with her friends about the girls they didn’t like in school between classes. It’d been like picking a scab.

 

There were just some people she never could stand, she’d tried to think: _I’ll pray for them._

 

She doesn’t want to pray for the woman who’s come into her life again like she’s always had a right to do so. Kate knows she’s far outgrown her old adolescent habits but like a lot of things around her nothing truly seems to have changed.

 

Kate is still angry and things still piss her off. Santanico or Kisa or whatever she wants to be called is one of them.

 

It’s not as simple as jealous, she is jealous, but not in the ways that matter. There is something worse than that, the urge to rip her claws at her own skin over the transgression of the woman who doesn’t have the decency to look aggrieved by her own actions.

 

The woman who salts the wounds she left behind a lifetime ago with the taunt that anything Kate might have Santanico or Kisa has had first. And, she’s as good as she ever was at making others bend like green twigs in her dangerous hands, she goads and cajoles and has brought Kate as low as she had been struck down too and Kate _hates_ her for it, for dragging her down to this level.

 

There is no wool over her eyes over the choices she’s made for herself, Kate knows she’s been complicit in a lot, too much maybe, and that she has made choices to put herself in the places she has found herself. She wasn’t raised to be an ostrich, she was taught to admit her faults and try to correct them, to ask forgiveness for her weaknesses and pray for the strength to be better tomorrow. But, Santanico Pandemonium was the catalyst. By all accounts, Kate’s family wasn’t supposed to be involved with any of what led them to their not nearly painless or quiet deaths in lonely places, fate be damned, Kisa, if that’s what she wants to be called now, _put them there_.

 

Kate thinks of words she had never called someone in full voice, _bitch_. She is a bitch who has only ever wanted her own vengeance, her own retributions, a bitch who had little guilt or hesitation in sacrificing Kate’s life to get it.

 

So, Kate thinks, _fuck her._

 

“ _You’re_ beautiful, but you’re ugly, inside, too. What do you want?”

 

“Why can’t we just talk?” Kisa asks, she’s pouting like a child to her mommy, it makes Kate’s insides twist strangely, the snake inside her burrows deeper.

 

“Collateral damage from what happened to my family, to _me_.”

 

There’s a flash of bright white between the wine of her lips, “Well, I guess we don’t have to talk if you don’t want to.”

 

Kate bristles, still stuck by the hot wash of venom in her blood. It’s babying but she scowls and tries to sound scathing when she says, “So leave.”

 

She doesn’t, she only swings from her perch to rise up above Kate, on her knees and shrugs out of her jacket, it hits the carpeting with a small sound, zippers rattling.

 

The woman she’ll always know as Santanico first studies her from above, like a bird instead of a snake, her hands lithe and pretty reaching and stroking over her collar, the other tracing a nail along the hem of her thin shirt.

 

Kate squirms, “What are you doing?” She knows what her face must look like, red and wide-eyed, not wanting to be touched while she’s still so angry, it’s wrong. Her pride bleeds the same way she leaks wetness over the inside of her shorts.

 

She feels swollen and warm.

 

Santanico arches down and her words are sweet like her breath on Kate’s mouth. “I want to know what it is about you that makes him so desperate.”

 

“Fuck you.”

 

The words are ignored and viper quick hands yank down the straps of her shirt and fingers rasp over her nipples in careless exploration.

 

“You’re soft.” Kate hears above her heavy breathing, too fast and she cannot stop, her ribs hurt from the force of trying to keep steady.

 

She turns her head when dark red lips press on her pulse like Santanico is counting her heartbeats. Kate goes weak and stares at the closest doors, she can just barely see her own face behind the black of the other woman’s long hair curtaining them both. Kate tells her softly, quietly hurt and still angry, “Stop messing around because you’re mad at him.”  

 

“Is that what you two do? Play games when you are mad at the other? Games like this?” Fingernails pull over her breast, gently but leaving marks behind like a blush.

 

“No games, Kate. I’ve only been with men because it was necessary.”

 

“That’s a shitty thing to have done to Richie.”

 

“He freed me.”

 

“So, he’s the exception to the rule?”

 

“Don’t change the subject, Kate.”

 

It doesn’t seem to be much trouble to get her out of her sleep shorts, they stay inside out at the foot of the bed and Kate can feel the stickiness of her own arousal against her ankles when she twists her feet, the most she can do as the woman who’s been called a goddess presses closer.

 

There are nails tracing down over the tops of her thighs, moving in a rasping over where she’s feeling as warm as she does with a man who’s been inside both of them. She can see them fucking, a memory in her mind that’s brighter when she shuts her eyes.

 

Fingers fan over between her legs.

 

She gasps and burns hot with something like shame. “No, don’t.”

 

And nails caress over where she’s warm in some awful wrong way, it’s so much the same and so different as when it was Richie once. It’s never been so slow or premeditated. She’s never gotten so wet over so little before.

 

The woman who isn’t really there preens against her skin and her voice is something close to a purr or a hiss.

 

“He’s a good lover, isn’t he?”

 

Kate twists away from the cheek pressed against hers and hair tumbles over her face, the fall of it smells like night jasmine, bergamot, and the heady sap of weepy trees.

 

“Shut up.”

 

But the touches don’t stop and neither does the feels of warm skin over her own, their navels press together whenever she inhales a staccato breath, the rapid flutter of her aorta making her jump in her own skin. It isn’t enough for the snake above her.

 

“That’s because he gives you what you want.”

 

Kate wants, she can hear the slick sounds of what’s being done to her, her body is a mortification, there’s neediness and shame and lust and half damaged pride.

 

Pride is the worst sin of all.

 

There’s the touch of a tongue on her throat before Santanico stops to say, “He’s good at reading people.”

 

“Ah!”

 

A long careful nail drags up over her clit, slowly, questing, pressing gently and Kate catches the flash of fangs at the edge of her vision.

 

Somewhere in the house something is awake. The floor at the top of the stairs creaks and kate shoves down a sound, they both can hear Richie. Kate knows he’s at the top of the stairs, looking down them at where her door is in the almost dark.

 

Kisa’s laugh is girlish and sweet and the way she touches her is gentle again, tracing around where she’s desperate and ready. Kate prays, silent and in small fragments of full thought, that Richie does not try to talk to her.

 

She laughs darkly. “He knew to be careful with me, waiting and patient, he was so gentle when I finally brought him to bed and…”

 

“Stop,” Kate begs feeling like she’s lost, there’s weight shifting on the stairs and then the floor creaks. She’s focused by something like fear, like anticipation. Against her skin Kisa is humming with some silent dark edge to her words and the way her body moves.

 

“He knows _you_ like games, making him listen when you stay up and touch yourself all morning, making him fight, making you feel weak, making you feel like you’re getting the punishment you deserve because you’re a monster. There’s so much guilt in you.”

 

Opened up with wetness cool on her thighs Kate can’t help how fast her hips push up when a careful fingertip and sharp nail circle around her before pushing in, gentle but tugging, it’s an achy fulfillment and she winces while her body clenches.

 

“You don’t even let him fill you up like this, fingers in your _pussy_ that you know would feel good, that know what to do better than yours.” The way Santanico says the words is strange and new and rasps over her neck like stubble.

 

Mortification smolders inside of her.

 

A second finger pushes in close to the other and Kate hates her. Nails dig into her tender thigh and the wet fingers inside of her retreat and catch her clit. It’s too much.

 

“Stop.”

 

“I think you like it.”

 

“Fuck you.” She’s hot behind her eyes. She wants to scream and rip out the throat stretched over her mouth.

 

“We don’t have to be enemies Kate, we can be friends. Let me make you feel better.”

 

Kate tries again to struggle away but the trance holds firm.

 

“You try so hard to run from this, but do you even know?” Santanico taunts. “Did Richie tell you?” When Kate doesn’t answer she cheshires. “Of course he didn’t. This _big bad_ as you so mockingly call him, he is more than us all. And he is angry. Angry enough to kill your brother when he tried to keep him from rising.”

 

Kate’s attention jerks from lust with a start, she stares at the serpent and Santanico is all honesty. “Ask Richard, he will tell you.”

 

She shakes her head. “He only hasn’t because he knew it wouldn’t change my mind. Scott’s dead. I can’t fix it.”

 

“But you could get revenge,” the goddess purrs.

 

“I’m not like you.”

 

“Oh, nina, you and I both know you are lying.”

 

Santanico’s mouth smears red on her skin, all the way down Kate’s shaking body, it’s burning her alive. There are teeth pricking the flare of her hips and lips blowing a kiss at her sex and she wants to twist away but venom holds her as steady as hands.

 

Something wails irritably, some lamenting thing in the room and Kate is sure it’s her own voice devolved into some wordless plea but then there’s no one else but her, limbs stretched out across the bed and the cat staring up at her from the floor.

 

The flick of a lighter wheel and the hiss of butane in the hall help her shake off who’s been in her head, what Santanico built up inside of her fades fast.

 

Through the door he’s heard her bed creaking, the sounds she’s been making in the dark. “Why’d you stop, having trouble? I can help you get there.” He sounds so smug she wants to hit him. She inhales and stares at the ceiling. “Kate?”

 

She can’t move off the bed and she doesn’t know how to explain what’s happened, his obliviousness is like a mortal blow, it makes her realize he doesn’t know everything. She lies.

 

“I fed on something moody. I’ll be fine.”

 

He’s still standing outside her door. He doesn’t walk back up the stairs.

 

“Just leave me alone.”

 

_‘That’s not nice, remember how sensitive he is.’_

 

She keeps herself awake through the rest of the night, refusing to be Santanico’s prey longer than she has to.

* * *

 

 

Something is inside of her, it’s tied itself into a knot inside of her guts and she wants to open herself up like a halloween pumpkin and carve it out into a bucket of slop.

 

“What’s wrong with you?”

 

Her insides cramp and she can’t offer an answer. It’s worse than food poisoning and menstrual discomfort but not near as bad as she knows she could feel. There’s a violation to the pain that makes it almost unbearable.

 

“Punch me in the stomach.”

 

He blinks.

 

She repeats herself and he blinks again.

 

“No.”

 

“Just do it.”

 

“You’re being weird.” He tries to leave the room but she says his name and let’s her mind sink away into the primal place inside of her, reptile brain and ancient, he can’t look away from her and she tells him again what she wants him to do and he does it without pause or morals.

 

His fist is like lead and she can’t breathe, her diaphragm shuddering and she vomits onto the shine of his shoes, a long torrent of bile and digested blood like coffee grounds, the the coils of a snake, thick and heavy slipping over itself and his shoelaces.

 

His surprise is almost comical.

 

Something that had been inside of him had slithered out and into her, it’s some kind of metaphor for their entire coexistence. She becoming more reptile everyday, more Gecko too. She thinks about her brother, about what Santanico said, what would Scott think of her now?

 

Vomiting up the snake has made her feel unclean. After, she gargles with rubbing alcohol and swallows it to feel some sense of sterile.

 

“We need to get a tank for it.”

 

Her stare is something that makes him stop speaking.

 

“Why don’t you just swallow it again?”

 

“You’re mad, but,” he holds up his hands, “not my fault.”

 

Her nostrils flare when she inhales, she can feel it, she can feel the rage in her guts just like she can feel Santanico’s nails dragging over her thighs and the stick of her lipstick on her throat.

 

“When I see her again I’m gonna slap her fucking face.”

 

His expression turns flat, “Why?”

 

She shoves half a waffle into her mouth to keep from answering and walks out of the room around the overturned colander. He follows her to the stairs and stops, staring at her bare leg where puncture marks linger from the venom of the serpent left in the kitchen.

 

“I tell Freddie I don’t want to go back to Mexico and she shows up to do her dance of the seven veils, on _me_. So, fuck her. You can tell her I said that.”

 

“I talk to Seth, not to her.”

 

Her laugh shatters the stern look on his face. “You think she’s not going to come try to convince you too?” He doesn’t follow her up the stairs.

 

He’s still standing at the landing when she looks over the railing. She knows she’s being cruel and Santanico’s admonishments ring through her thoughts.

 

“I’m sorry,” she apologizes, she can’t readily remember the last time she ever gave him that much before.  “I just, she just showed up, I guess you know what that’s like, but...I, why can’t they just leave me alone?”

 

“Is that how you really feel?”

 

“She told me about Scott, she said you knew…”

 

His silence answers her.

 

“I’m not mad you didn’t tell me, I’m just mad that I’m...mad about it. I’m still mad he’s dead and I don’t want to be like her.”

 

“Everyone is entitled to justice,” he says.

 

“Not when it involves so much blood.”

 

“I should’ve told you, but I didn’t want to cause you any more pain.”

 

Her nasal cavities feel hot, her vision is foggy. “But they don’t care about that. They want to ruin it. You’re the only one who’s been here, they don’t know,” she wants to cry, no one knows. “I don’t want to be alone and I don’t want that kind of responsibility.”

 

He doesn’t come after her when she goes to Scott’s old room and begins to weep, she’s glad he can give her this much dignity.

 

* * *

 

He knows he’s asleep and he’s knows he is not dreaming, she’s at the window, pulling back the curtain to peek out at the sun.

 

“I like her, she’s atrevida, but muy facil to push around, put where you want her. I bet she let’s you do all sorts of things to her. _Lozanita_.”

 

His nostrils flare in irritation, he’s quick to Kate’s defense. “Maybe, it helps her forget that she and everyone she ever cared about is dead. Sound familiar?”

 

“Some things you can’t forget.” She almost sounds like she means it, like she’s sincere until she adds, “She won’t ever forget the first time you put yourself inside of her.”

 

He sits up, “Just because you didn’t suck my dick or let me mess up your lipstick doesn’t make you better, you let me inside you and thought it made us even after you got in my head, you made me love you, and then you left.”

 

“ _Que_? So, you play house with her, you feed her, you fuck her and that’s love?” She seems offended at his actions, he doesn’t know whose side she’s on, remembers that it’s no one’s but her own; living an eternity gears one for self-preservation she once said to him, he understands, but only to an extent. He’d give his life for his brother’s, for Kate’s, even. But, Santanico would not, she’s never been able to trust enough to imagine it.

 

“It’s not about that. It doesn’t _have_ to be like that, we’re here together and it doesn’t hurt,” he stops, reconsiders, “No, it does, a little, but I want her to forgive me.”

 

“That’s sweet, Richard.” She’s neither condescending nor sincere.

 

He pulls up his knees and the sheet stretches over them, he sighs, tired even though he’s still sleeping. “Just tell me what you want.”

 

“Something is happening and you can’t just keep playing house, your brother needs you.”

 

“My brother hung up on me.”

 

“You know he won’t apologize, why do you keep hoping for it?”

 

“It must not be that important, then.”

 

“It _is_ Richard.” Her eyes flash tawny and the room rumbles, they’re in her world in his head, a secret little space she carved out for herself inside of him long ago.

 

“What’d you do to Kate?”

 

She shrugs but turns her head down, like she’s just the slightest bit ashamed of it. “Nothing she didn’t want from someone.”

 

“That’s bullshit,” he says. “She’s shy to her own temptation, she thinks it makes her more of a sinner. She’s become a real masochist in order to adjust to what we made her. And, she locked herself up like a princess in a tower, and needed someone to save her. Which, again, should sound familiar.” He gets up from the bed, disgusted.

 

Suddenly he’s dressed. The full look, cufflinks and all, his glasses are in his pocket but he pulls them out and pushes them into place.

 

She reaches out for a lone ray of sun in the room and holds her hand in its warmth, here it does not burst into flames, but it isn’t real, either. “She chose her chains.”

 

“After you’d already thrown her in the dungeon!” he shouts. He’s angry of how she has always acted like she’s made of stone, immovable, he’d gotten sick of it while they were still together.

 

It surprises him when she looks up and he sees the beading of tears on her long coal black lashes. Her mascara does not run. “I did not tell Carlos to take her for me. He came up with that part on his own.”

 

His voice is softer when he says, “But you did nothing to stop it, either.”

 

“And I should have.” It’s one of the few times he’s heard her admit she is at fault. “I’ve seen inside of her too, Richard. I felt her pain, I know it.”

 

“At least you feel bad, you deserve to.”

 

There’s a long moment of silence before she is back to her ancient self, sealed away behind a beautiful mask. “You need to help us.”

 

“I don’t _need_ to do anything. What’s stopping me from sitting back with Kate and watching the world end?”

 

She’s in his face suddenly, her nails are in his cheeks, her eyes are ancient, she is _mad_. “Stop acting like a spoiled brat and do your duty, Richard.”

 

He pushes her off, falling away into cold, the stone floor of the temple against his neck, he smells the rot and death of eons. “Get the fuck out of my head!”

 

He does not see her in the dark but her voice is all around, he presses his hands to his ears as she whispers, “You can’t hide from the world forever Xbalanque.”

 

He presses his eyes shut  and wills himself into consciousness, and when he wakes there’s dirt on his clothes and bugs in his bed.

 

Immediately he makes himself vomit the serpent from his belly that crawled out of its trap in the kitchen and back inside of him. He seals it in a cardboard box and sends it to his brother via express shipping.

* * *

 

 

He doesn’t press things, lets them wait for three weeks without a word about Mexico or Santanico in his dreams or the snake or Freddie’s pleas or the silence and _you have no messages_ on his voicemail from his brother. But, it crests like it always does.

 

She uses a bump key on a house that used to belong to some girl she went to highschool with, she is determined to revisit the places of her childhood, and he follows for want of anything better to do but also because he wants to have her naked underneath him in a place she used to have prepubescent sleepovers at.

 

There’s something unclean and deeply stimulating about making worthwhile explicit encounters take place in the same places she’s slept with a special blanket or stuffed animal in.

 

She tells him about how she had to break a doorknob with a fire extinguisher because she hadn’t quite gotten the ‘it’s all in the wrist’ part down pat, and he can’t control his mouth.

 

“Why don’t you want to see him?”

 

“What?”

 

The world feels like it’s jerked to a stop. He scuffs his shoe and looks away, he knows immediately he should not have said anything.

 

“Come on, Kate.”

 

She looks like she might cry, shaking her head purposefully and her voice very steadily saying, “I don’t want to go anywhere.”

 

“Bullshit.”

 

“You don’t want to see him either.”

 

“...”

 

His silence makes her unsure. Her tone is quiet, betrayed even, “Unless, you do.”

 

“...”

 

“Why’d you act like you don’t want to go?”

 

He can only shrug and keep himself from meeting her stare behind her black sunglasses. “United front.”

 

She scoffs and turns away from the abandoned house, taking the steps of the back porch all at once. She turns halfway and looks up at him, trying hard for nonchalance in a way that reminds him of his brother. “Well you don’t have to take my side just because you think I’ll let you sleep with me if you’re nice to me.”

 

His grin doesn’t reach his eyes. “It makes you hornier when I’m not so nice.” But, his words don’t have an effect on her this time, she doesn’t flinch or blush or step closer.

 

“Sometimes I think you know just how to be kind and other times you say things like that.”

 

He tries to goad her, “You’re wearing your sunglasses again. You afraid you’ll make me do something?”

 

She doesn’t take the bait, she looks defeated as she walks away from him.

* * *

 

 

Something breaks in the hall outside her room.  She sits up in bed to listen, it’s dusk but she’s still groggy when the door creaks open and like a monster he fills the frame. It spooks Slither, she darts off the bed into the hall with a hiss.

 

He’s wearing his glasses and his watch. He sways and holds the frame.

 

“Are you okay.”

 

“Crank addict tried to break in.”

 

He shuffles back into the hall for a moment before dragging a mangled corpse in by the ankle. The man’s features are hard to make out under a scraggly beard and baggy clothes, his blood floods her senses but she can smell B.O. and other unhygienic scents under that. More than anything she’s mad Richie got blood on the carpet. “I left you some.”

 

He looks proud to have something to share with her, a snack, a gift, he likes to give her things and she hates how much his sincerity softens her better sense to his baser needs. His grin is very white in the dark and his glasses shine, his cock is tight and heavy against his navel. It feels like some sort of magic trick as her body reacts, the heat in her limbs and the start of herself getting wet. She can still smell the blood puddling on the floor from the dead man.

 

“No thanks, I ate yesterday.”

 

She hasn’t finished giving him her answer before he’s crouched on the floor finishing what’s left of his offering. When he rises again his mouth is grisly and his body is half scales, his eyes are reptilian yellow and his fangs stab into his smile.

 

When he wipes at his lips he only ends up smearing it down his throat, across his front as he rubs at his chest and then his stomach, he traces fingers over the swollen head of his cock and hisses happily.

 

Sleep sloughs off of her while she pushes her hair out of her face. She twists inside the sheets and presses herself closer to the mattress, her nipples rubbing against the inside of her t-shirt as she arches.

 

He moves slowly until he’s next to the bed and then she has to turn her head to look at him over her shoulder.

 

Her sheet is gone, ripped off and then her ankles are in his hands, pulled to the foot of the bed, his hands on her hips to coax her ass up, when she looks back he’s kneeling on the floor, manic glee shining bright through all the blood on his face.

 

He noses at her half-through the cotton and she wonders why she shouldn’t allow him some small victory, why she shouldn’t let him make her feel good. His mouth opens over her mound, half hidden and he tongues her open through cotton.

 

Her fruit of the looms are being peeled off with the slow focus of partial insanity, “Don’t.” She warns him but barely means it.

 

He slows but doesn’t stop.

 

“You smell good.”

 

“Okay.” She breathes.

 

Her panties are still around her calves when his tongue presses through the wetness between her folds, spreading it, her knees feel like they are melting as they slip open against the bed, she’s only just starting to stir from half-awake towards something with more of a spine, he likes her pliable and his hands smooth over her ass, then the front of her thighs to pull them apart so he can lean closer.

 

His whole mouth over her helps her rise up onto her elbows and put her forehead to the pillows.

 

“Wiggle.” He says and she can’t comprehend fast enough to avoid the sudden smack to her ass. He’s spanked her like a child and she’s turned into a halloween cat.

 

“Keep dreaming.” She mumbles.

 

He muffles a laugh against the bottom rung of her spine, the space between the back of her hips where every bit of vertebra she has meets in some galaxy of sensation, where every warm orgasm starts.

 

“I’m going to spank you.”

 

“No, you’re not.”

 

She wouldn’t really mind if he did but she still feels like she shouldn’t let him have what he wants just because he’s asked for it, it feels too easy.

 

Santanico is right, she does like to play games.

 

“I love your ass.”

 

His hands grab at her as he talks, he bites gently at the bottom curve where it meets her thigh. Too gently.

 

He chuckles like he can hear what she doesn’t say before he sets his teeth to the same circle of skin and holds her roughly with his bite until she kicks her feet and fights to be released.

 

It hurts and throbs and she can feel the slow glide of wetness out of her, his fingers exploring between her legs make her bite her pillow.

 

“And you like it when I make it hurt.”

 

He pumps her full of fingers, the stretch achy at first, his hand low on on her spine. Her face burns, knowing he can see every part of her.

 

“Breathe, Katie.”

 

She does and the way his fingers slide deeper make her toes curl toward her soles. Her orgasm is a slow sleepy thing. Every joint is gelatin and there’s warmth under the sweet ache sunk into her lower back and the inside of each thigh.

 

He nips at the back of her hip and rubs his cheek against the curve of her ass, she twitches forward, half-amused at his sweet eagerness.

 

“What are you doing?”

 

His chuckle is low and dirty, like his tongue swiping the seam of her sex, hot and slick and swollen, she pushes her thighs tighter together.

 

“I want to make you cum again.”

 

Her voice is shaky, “yeah.”

 

He licks again, another warm lash across her cunt and edging up. Her back curls. She whines. “Richie,” he hums so she knows he’s heard, she tells him anyway, “hey, slow down.”

 

Laughter rumbles over her. His hands cover her ass, his fingers press, then pull and when his tongue flicks where her sex ends she shudders, “Richie,” she whines, “not that.”

 

His tongue leaves her and he blows before asking, “Why not?”

 

“It feels...weird.”

 

“Guess you’ll just have to suffer through it then.”

 

Her face is on fire, shame makes her spine prickle and her thighs wet with something like lust, something greedier, hungrier, she wants to wear him like a flayed skin, hot blood drying sticky on her skin, the taste of him on her gums.

 

He goes slower, his tongue hot and insistent, hand holding her ass and spreading her open. She breathes his name and tells him she likes it when he pulls away to ask.

 

His laughter is thunder.  “Of course you do, you like everything I do to you.”

 

“Stop talking.”

 

“You’re like,” he stops, chin propped on the small of her back, his laughter like a purr on her spine, “my own little slut.”

 

“You _must_ be high.”

 

“Say it anyway.”

 

She breathes, hard, his hands feel like they are everywhere and his mouth presses against her skin but offers no real effort.

 

“What?”

 

“Say that you’re my slut.”

 

The squirm of his tongue feels filthy and she bites down hard on the inside of her arm, squeals when he only prods with the tip of his tongue between the cheeks of her ass; the heat of her skin only serves to make it feel better which makes her blush more in tandem.

 

Her pussy throbs. She wants his fingers or his cock, she shuts her eyes tight. But, he drags a fingertip along her slit, his tongue still working on her in a way she can’t quite keep from trying to pull away from.

 

“Say it and I’ll finger you while I’m eating your ass.”

 

She swallows down whatever she could say that might keep him from sounding smug later because she wants the same thing he does.

 

“I’m you’re little slut.” She whispers it, quickly, ashamed of herself, of the want she carries around inside of her that he nurtures like a poisonous flower inside of her. He doesn’t make her say it again.

 

The sounds he makes is some enthusiastic exhale of happy surprise, his fingers slip inside, stroking without pause, in rhythm with his tongue.

 

He works her over until she’s panting, his mouth moving in tandem to his fingers, tongue pressing in and she whines, it’s so much at once she barely keeps remembering to breathe through it, he adds a third finger and she’s swollen, it aches until he presses his thumb against her clit and it’s sweet, he bites the curve of her ass, carves his teeth gently over her skin and it’s her undoing.

 

She cums, her spine like molten heat, it leaves her with her ass up in the air and her knees planted wide, she rubs her breasts across the sheets and tongues where she's bitten her lip raw, she should feels ashamed but there is nothing but a want for more.

 

When he finally fucks her she feels stretched, he gets deep and it feels like too much, it’s what she’s wanted. He’s curled over her shoulders, elbows dug down like their knees in the mattress and she’s wrapped hands around his biceps, she can watch if she turns her head, the mirrored closet doors are right there, she glances and blinks first when he looks at the reflection they make together.

 

He palms her breasts in turn and pinches each nipple, fondly, gently, like he’s trying to be tender but doesn’t quite know how.

 

The dead pulse in his wrist is warm when she presses lips to it.

 

“Do it.”

 

She does, without thought, she’s only doing what she’s been told. His blood in her mouth is as good as the heaviness of his dick inside of her. She sucks at the hot wash of it and swallows. Her mind feels like it’s dissolving, she can taste the long years of desperate want in him.

 

He would do anything for her.

 

There’s loneliness too, under something that tastes like hate, they aren’t that much different from each other anymore.

* * *

 

       

It’s four-thirty in the afternoon when she wakes up, sore and well-used, his humid exhale on her collarbone. It makes her breathing shallow to look at him, face pressed to the pillow and hair over his brow, sprawled on his stomach, a foot hanging off the bed and so much of him that she can look at, touch, and not have to answer for it.

 

His bites had been full of venom and her limbs are achy from holding them around him so tightly.

 

She picks up her pajamas from the floor and steps into them again, leaves him sleeping and feeds Slither before feeding herself.

 

The cereal is too sweet but the effort of a real meal, or hunting, seems far too elaborate. Her mind is empty and she tries not to wonder if it’s because she’d been fucked so thoroughly that he’s scrambled her brains into a post-coital omelet of opiates and endorphins.

 

His bare feet stick on the linoleum. He doesn’t say anything.

 

“I didn’t mean to leave you in bed. I just got hungry.”

 

An eyebrow rises into his hairline, “Hungry?”

 

She lifts her bowl, “Cereal.”

 

His grin is big and he ruffles the back of his hair, reaching with the other towards where she’s perched on the counter. “Well, gimme some.”

 

His mouth around her spoon makes her flush.

 

She wants to kiss him again. “Did you brush your teeth?”

 

He laughs like it’s the funniest thing he has ever heard, “Nope.”

 

Still, she lets him take her bowl from her and drink the milk from it, it slips down the skin of his throat, the gulp visible and she can feel the tackiness of his release on the inside of her thighs, inside of her, it’s slick and messy, still. He’d still been high on drugged blood when, towards late morning he’d stirred from dozing and pulled her leg over his hip, got close and fucked her awake, gently. He’d made her cum like it was the easiest thing in the world and she’d watched his face, soft and sleepy, his mouth an open pout and his eyes heavy lidded. He slurps and she comes back into the moment. “Hey?”

 

He pulls his lips away from her bowl. “What is it?”

 

“...” She doesn’t have the words to say she liked him waking her up in the night with the leashed violence he so often keeps in check or that she liked what came after, the happy, half-aggression and fervor he touched her with. Or that she’d almost told him he could always sleep in her bed with her when he’d woken her up a second time.

 

“I hurt you?”

 

She shakes her head. “No.” Her shoulder rises in half a shrug, “I guess I liked it. Kinda.”

 

He grins, 1000 watts of conman grift. “Preacher’s daughter likes it filthy.”

 

There’s a slow pause where he finishes drinking down the sugar sweet milk of her late breakfast and she comes down from the counter, crossed arms loosening and her voice soft, “I guess I do.”

 

He blinks slowly, like he’s gone dumb or his brain has gone cold, warming up slowly when she strokes down his front with her knuckles, the cotton of his sleep pants warm and soft on the back of her hand.

 

The loose bow falls apart with half a tug. His mouth doesn't hang open, he just looks cool and calm and she likes that.

 

Her descent down is just as cool, to his credit he gets it, smooths a hand over the top of her head and down the fall of her hair and then over the back of her neck.

 

He thumbs the bell curve of her shoulder, his teeth had carved over it and there’d been venom to his bite and it’s healing slow but steady.“I really worked you over.”

 

She ignores his assessment. “Can I suck your cock?”

 

There’s something lodged in his throat, an answer maybe, he can’t force it out, can only nod and she looks back down to where he’s tenting his pants.

 

“You’re not going to turn my balls into a pincushion again this time, right?”

 

“Practice. Makes. Perfect.” Each word leaves her mouth carefully measured in a tone she isn’t sure is hers, she sounds like someone else.”

 

“You’re perfect.” He exhales when she presses her lips against where he’s swelling in her hands.

 

He tast’s like a memory, like copper when she taps her tongue against where her thumb makes him sway closer.

 

She pulls away and he eeks out a sound like a little boy.

 

“Can we go back to bed?”

 

“Suck it and swallow and I’ll carry you there and write a haiku about your mouth.”

 

“My knees hurt.”

 

“You’re teasing me.” But he’s smiling at her when she looks up.

 

She shuts her mouth over him, hand pulling at where she’s made him slick with her tongue, he tastes like her too, and she takes him with a sloppy bob of her head that she can’t keep it as steady as she’d hoped but she keeps her fangs from dropping.

 

The hot spill of his orgasm isn’t a surprise but it doesn’t go down clean or easy, he laughs at how she wipes her mouth on the edge of his shirt and the back of her hand, pugnacious and scowling.

 

Later, they bury the body in the yard next to the dead girl she hid there for Scott decades ago; they scrub the blood out of the carpet while listening to an eighties station on the radio while he reads her the haiku he wrote about her mouth.

* * *

 

 

He can’t read her the way he used to.

 

Weekly feedings have made her mind a steel trap and it’s nice to watch him squirm for once, not knowing what secret she’s keeping.

 

In the car she stares out the window and he keeps glancing at her bar legs, the high heels.

 

“I’m wearing the panties you bought for me.” She tells him. It’s merciful, she decides, better than leaving him edgy and mean for the rest of the night.

 

The end up somewhere that he needs to throw his keys at a valet in order to park. They sit on art deco stools in a trendy bar he’s all but smuggled her into. Realization dawns in a way that leaves her humored. They’re sitting in a hotel bar and things make sense. It’s like a scene out of some movie. Where she’s been mistaken for something that can be bought.

 

It’s like some fantasy of his she didn’t know she was helping to enact, she’s not even mad, it’s like she’s been costumed by him too, in things he’s bought for her. Jewelry like trinkets, dress, heels, all appropriate and demure and maybe a little too modest like a film noir femme fille in too modern an age.

 

“Is it your birthday or something?” She asks not really expecting the answer to be that, he’s as whimsical as his brother could be.

 

“You already missed it.”

 

“So, are we working? Or is this some kind of game?” She leans closer and drops her voice, “Are you pulling a job and using me as your fake date to avoid complications.”

 

He laughs, it’s real and perfect and she smiles.

 

His cell phone chimes.

 

His grin fades when he reads the text message and he looks around the bar.

 

There’s a man in the last booth against the wall, farthest from the door, he’s tipping back a beer and he has a beard again, it’s more pepper than salt but he’s gone grey at the temples. Age looks good on Seth. He nods at them and she swivels her stool back around and stares at the mirror behind the shelves of the bar, traces the wet ring on her coaster. It feels like she’s been punched in the gut, seeing him again. It’s been years and he looks so changed while she does not; she decides with aching insides that nostalgia has always been a bitch.

 

“So, we were always going to meeting Seth. Thanks for the memo.”

 

Richie’s face falls, his shoulders deflate and he looks disappointed, spurned. “He said he would meet us tomorrow night.”

 

She frowns too, angry that she’s made him look so dejected, she’d been having fun. “So, how was this supposed to go before Seth decided to show up early?”

 

He shrugs. “Doesn’t matter.”

 

“Is it a sex thing?”

 

His entire posture changges and when he looks up at her from under his brow. something darker in it.  “Do you want it to be?” His hand slides up her knee, the skirt of her dress hiding the path he takes.

 

“I thought you were taking me here because you wanted to play pretend or something.”

 

“We can, if you want.”

 

She looks over her shoulder again to where his brother is sitting, all gray fox with amber eyes staring at her, at Richie’s hand on her thigh, there’s a twitch of a smirk on his lips and also something that looks like jealousy from the clench of his jaw. It makes something inside of her recoil, she suddenly feels violated by the both of them all at once, she’s forgotten how overwhelming it is to be in the same room as the infamous Gecko brothers.

 

So she does the only rational thing and runs, making a quick excuse of, “I need some air,” ducking out into the lobby, onto the street. She shimmies out of her heels and starts to sprint, not caring of who looks at her strangely for it, she just has to get away for a moment, she feels trapped, she feels like their hostage again.

 

She’s nearly a mile out of town when her cellphone rings, her dress is ripped and her feet covered in gravel nicks and dirt, tiny wounds on her soles heal quickly. She digs for where her cell is tucked in her cleavage. An unfamiliar number comes up on the caller I.D. and she knows who it is before she answers.

 

“You’re both assholes,” she says.

 

“It’s good to hear your voice, princess.”

 

“First Freddie, then Santanico, now you. What’s next, you’re gonna bring my brother back from the dead to convince me?”

 

There’s a long pause before he sighs, he sounds so much older and it actually _hurts_ her to think about his mortality. “Please come back and talk, Kate. I’ll buy you a daiquiri and teach you locks again, Richie says you could use some fine tuning.” He wants it to be like old times, she wants to tell him that girl he knew in Mexico is dead.

 

Instead she watches a semi blaze by with a warning horn when it sees her on the otherwise desolate highway. It’s unusually cold for a Texan summer, goosebumps prickle on her arms and she misses the feel of the sun.

 

“Okay,” she sighs. “But you’re gonna have to come pick me up.”

 

“Where are you?” It’s Richie’s voice on the phone this time, she knows he’s yanked it from his brother’s hand without warning, there’s concern and fear in his tone.

 

She’s still mad at him, but it smells like rain and she doesn’t feel like running anymore. She looks around for a mile marker but there’s nothing other than road and fields in sight. “Um, I don’t know, actually.”

 

She can actually feel him roll his eyes. “Give us thirty minutes.”

 

Sure enough, they pull up in Richie’s car eighteen-hundred seconds later; she’s sitting on the side of the road smoking from a pack she stole off him and hid in her cleavage along with her phone. Seth leans out the side of the car and wolf-whistles at her.

 

“You’ve seen better days, girl,” he says, looking at her tangled hair and ripped up dress.

 

“Speak for yourself, old man.”

 

He holds a hand to his heart mockingly. “So much for a happy reunion.”

 

She flips him the bird and climbs into the back seat, holding up a hand when Richie tries to speak and telling him to drive. She stares at him staring at her in the side-mirror, it’s vicious but she grins, he looks dejected again. He knows she won’t be sharing the king size in his hotel room when the night is over.

 

A part of her feels powerful. She looks away, trying not to think about how delicious Seth smells in the passenger seat as her stomach growls.


	5. Rachel, wife of Jacob

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for the long wait  
> thanks for the comments and the kudos

The valet smiles wide and with maximum wattage. 

 

“Welcome back, sir.” 

 

Kate meets Richie’s stare and slides her glance towards Seth. Richie nods and she purses her lips, looks away and follows. The valet doesn’t stare at her bare, raw feet or her wind tangled hair.

 

Her scowl edges up into a smirk, “How much do you pay them to call your ‘Sir’?” 

 

“When you own their place of employment, it’s free.”

 

She stops, mouth shutting when she notices it’s wide open, Richie slows his hurried pace, turning to look at her.

 

“This is  _ your _ hotel?”

 

Seth chuckles and looks over his shoulder, “Surprised, kid? I mean, come on, it’s called  _ El Rey _ .”

 

Kate shakes her head, an offhand memory of beautiful women and paradise, something he’d told her when she was young, he’d offered to take her there with him, once, but he’d been high and it’d hurt her to be reminded once again that she was not his brother and only mattered in a fantasy world where Seth wasn’t a bad man.

 

“By your business acumen maybe, but not by your awful taste,” Richie supplies when words fail her. 

 

“I need a drink,” she announces, peeling away from their slow amble in line to the elevators and back towards the bar. 

 

They follow her and she feels powerful.

 

When they reach her destination, she orders four shots of tequila. 

 

“Tequila squared?” the bartender asks with bewilderment, and she nods; he gives an oblivious eye to Seth behind her, ‘cause she still looks seventeen and small, but the boss gives him the go ahead and the confused man pours them out in doubles, she takes one after another without a chaser, there’s barely a buzz so she orders two more, squared                                                                          .

“Set for a wild night?” Richie asks her, the bartender gives an inconspicuous nod, she imagines this will be a wild story for him to tell the other employees about their boss and the company he keeps later on break. 

 

The Geckos have a way of having tales spread about their antics that respect, like a couple of movie gangsters, the way they’ve always wanted.

 

“Don’t talk to me until I’m drunk,” she answers, and continues on her mission, Seth simply takes the barstool next to hers and orders a shot for himself, along with lime and salt.

 

“Getting old’s made you squeamish,” Richie says.

 

“And being immortal makes you think your dick is bigger than it is,” she parries before her next shot, not even meaning to stick up for Seth, mad at Richie and wanting to hurt his pride more than anything.

 

For his part, he only rolls his eyes and steals one of her shots.

 

There’s a stern silence except the clink of glasses hitting the bar, and then for the sixth time in less than half an hour Richie’s phone chimes and he leaves with a short excuse, through the windows she can see him pacing the smoker’s deck against the rectangle of the night’s black sky, he starts working on a pack of smokes. 

 

She knows who’s on the other line. 

 

A heavy buzz has settled in her head after nearly a full bottle of tequila, she asks for the last of it in a glass and moves to the booth Seth had been sitting in, he follows with another beer in hand.

 

“You’re a heavier drinker than I remember,” he jokes.

 

“I’m not the one that escapes reality to deal with my problems on the daily,” she parries.

 

He doesn’t say anything but his brows do raise. It’s a lie, she’s been hiding out in her fallen down childhood home, playing house with his brother like they’re the fucking lost boys. 

 

She gulps the rest of her glass with one heavy swallow. He raises two fingers to the reasonably attractive waitress who’s been taking notice of him since they came into the bar and she gets the sign immediately; he could probably put her on retainer if he wanted, considering he owns the place, let alone he’s here with a girl who looks homeless and a quarter his age, drinking like a fish out of water. 

 

Kate’s irate suddenly, having forgotten how unnerving it is to be on the coattails of someone as handsome and suave as  _ the _ Seth Gecko.

Richie is nice to look at, but he’s a creep, bonafide serial killer in his movement and motive. Seth is  _ cool _ , a wolf with charm and a sharp tongue even behind his Gucci sheep fur. 

 

Girls love him and Kate’s hated herself before for being one of them, and again now for still getting stuck in his gravity so easily. 

 

He’s the honeypot, she’s the wasps nest.

 

When they’ve got another round, Richie still puffing away angrily on the porch, Seth finally asks her. “So, what happened, princess?”

 

And, though she’s mad at him, embarrassed, betrayed, heartbroken, it’s still so simple to open up, she’s intoxicated and he’s easily been able to pry her ribcage apart since the start, to crawl inside and make her voice rattle. Something about his easy manner always had and still does settle her, and even if he’s not a good man, he is loyal, and he  _ listens _ . 

 

“Scott didn’t let me die. I wish he would have.”

 

“I’m sorry, baby girl. I should’ve taken better care of you, I should’ve been there.” 

 

He looks heartbroken, too.

 

“Richie was there,” she spits like acid. 

 

The wince in Seth is nice, she likes to be mean sometimes, there’s a thrill in it, and the alcohol clouding her system makes everything a little more fun. 

 

“He didn’t stop it.” She pauses, reconsiders the past. “Well, I mean, he tried a little, but more than anything, he just  _ watched _ .”

 

The fall of Seth’s smirk is replaced by something new, a mask of nothing, the smooth, cool look of a man who’s just as bad as his brother, maybe worse because he can pretend to be otherwise to fit into polite company.

 

She shrugs flippantly, tossing a tangle lock of hair back over her shoulder, he tracks the motion with his eyes like some big jungle cat. 

 

“I still look Lolita fresh too, huh?” she asks, grinning. “That turn you on, old man?”

 

His voice is hoarse when he answers her, “I’m not here to play games, Kate.”

 

She cants her head to the side. 

 

“Aren’t you? Your brother and I play all sorts of them.”

 

Something bulges between his mandible and earlobe, his jaw clenching. Jealousy is what she decides it is by how his hand goes tight on his pant leg before it relaxes with conscious intention.

 

She can smell something spike in him, testosterone and blood as his heart beats faster. He’s thinking about Richie fucking her and he’s getting turned on by it. The angry silence is filled with her leer and his scowl, she sips her drink leisurely and he nurses his beer. 

 

Seth looks swiftly to where his brother disappeared to almost ten minutes ago, she’d call it nerves but it’s simply refocusing. 

 

She’s surprised he isn’t more talkative since once he used to tell her everything. Now, it’s like looking at a stranger, or maybe an old friend’s hot dad. 

 

A tingle licks through her, forking down her limbs and racing back between her femurs, frisson and friction meeting when she rubs her thighs together and presses down into the seat, the room is hot, she feels like a snake over bathed in the sun, needing to shed her skin and let someone fill her whole.

 

It’s weird to see him, to want him.

 

“Would you have let me die?” she asks, just to fill the void.

 

“I wouldn’t have made you a monster, if that’s what you’re asking.”

 

She looks at him only slowly. “No, you would’ve held me so I wasn’t lonely. They just left me there.”

 

“Hanging out with Richie has really done a number on your people skills.” He flags for yet another round, she knows it’s hard for him to talk about, she likes egging him on.

 

Her shrug is playful. “Who else is gonna keep me from goin’ nuts?” The waitress gives them their drinks, Kate smiles wide at her, she shrinks under the gaze, can tell in that moment that Kate’s a predator, something else-- doesn’t even look at Seth as she scurries away.

 

“I think he’s making it worse.”

 

Speaking of the devil, Richie returns, tall and broad and attention gathering from the night outside. 

 

“Who called?” she asks.

 

“Kisa. She wanted to know why we were meeting with Seth, but Seth wasn’t supposed to tell her.”

 

Seth shrugs, swallows his latest shot and sips his beer. “I didn’t.”

 

Richie’s stare is focused and Kate wonders how she did.

 

“You mailed the snake back right?” Kate asks Richie.

 

“Yeah, fuck you both for that,” Seth seethes before Richie can answer.

 

They drink and the bar empties, the pianist keeps playing some soft tinkling tinny melody from the corner of the room and they all steadily get closer to the people they used to be.

 

She’s the teenage girl, incredulous and irritated as she starts asking questions that are used more to point out the crux of her bad mood. “I thought you didn’t wanna go do this bullshit.”

 

Richie’s sigh is long and his sprawl across the tufted black leather of the booth next to his brother is painfully luxurious, half-drunk. 

 

“You honestly don’t want to be here?” he asks her.

 

She’s felt guilty over the entire thing, of needing to smother it down to function again, to feel normal, and then slowly coming to the realization that her new normal had become something that barely feels anything beyond hunger, certainly not the camaraderie of saving the world.

 

Seth’s tone is low and steady like a gun pointing right at her in front of his smooth smile.“I’d hate to twist your arm,” he says. “You can stay here if you want, or go back home. Wait it out.” 

 

And, he means it. No hard feelings and all the rest, she can wait, she can go back home. But, she knows now that Richie has seen his brother he won’t follow, she swallows down the pain of the intimation of knowledge she’s never wanted to admit to herself. 

 

She rides backseat, never shotgun to the twosome that is the Geckos.

 

“Freddie can’t come,” she tells them.

 

“He has to,” Seth counters.

 

“Someone needs to feed Slither.” 

 

The room is spinning, taking care of the furbaby is the only thing that makes sense right now; as long as Freddie keeps her away from the grandbaby, everything should be fine.

 

“You got a snake?” Seth asks, goggling.

 

“It’s a cat,” Richie explains.

 

“You’ll really come then?”

 

“Sure.” 

 

She tries to keep her tone venom-free but Richie’s eyes are on her, as steady as Seth’s grins and answers have been, she’s too drunk for this. 

 

“After all the shit you’ve put up with before you’re really going to help?” Seth asks.

 

“It’s what you want me to do, isn’t it?”

 

“Yeah, I just never thought you’d ever finally say yes.”

 

Richie sighs. “Don’t get a chubby baby brother, she’s suicidal.” He takes off his imitation glasses to clean them with the tablecloth. “She used to just not eat. When I first saw her she was a skeleton. I nursed her back to health and now she’s raising the stakes.”

 

“Thanks, Nurse Ratchet,” Kate scoffs. 

 

Richie grins.

 

“He kiss your booboos Katie?” Seth asks with a shiteating grin, like he’s got the last line in a cut scene.

 

Kate leans close, she can feel his inhale against her chest for a moment before she puts her lips close enough to rasp across where his stubble. “He kisses me all over. He’s going to when we go to our room.” She makes sure her hair drapes over his shirt front for a moment when she’s leaning away.  

 

Richie looks smug, but, underneath, he’s still mad.

* * *

 

  
  


They go their separate ways after finishing another bottle, she feels absolutely gone and therefore absolutely horny, all the play in the bar has made her underwear-- or what’s left of them after her run-- damp. 

 

She wants him.

 

She wants his brother, too, but Richie is familiar, Seth has always been the forbidden fruit, too real, too  _ human _ to fuck. She thinks that it’s kind of funny, giggles aloud as Richie calls for the elevator. 

 

Older people in the lobby are staring at the mess of her hanging off the pristine of him. He puts his hand on the small of her back and she burns, the gold and marble hall spins, she wants to kiss him but there’s too many people watching.

 

The gust of air conditioning sweeps in before the doors vacuum shut and she pushes him against the wall, he raises his eyebrows at her but doesn’t have time to question before her mouth is on his, he doesn’t resist.

 

Up on her toes she has to work hard to get her tongue past his teeth until an arm circles her and lifts her the rest of the way, he’s balanced her over his thigh and his slacks chafe the inside of her thighs.

 

She rubs the flat of her sole along the back of his calf and pulls up a knee to put dangerous pressure against where he’s tender amongst his scales. 

 

The bell chimes for their floor and the halls are ghostly, surreal in their emptiness and she slips down to her feet, want chokes her.

 

“I can smell how much you need it,” he murmurs in her mouth as he slides the card in the lock when they reach their room.

 

The door opens and she shoves him into the room, but not before he smoothly slides the  _ do not disturb _ sign into place. “Wanna taste it first?” she asks, playful.

 

His gaze burns into hers, erection jumping against her hip. “Are you asking me to  _ kiss you all over _ ? _ ” _

 

He sets her on the ottoman in the living room and begins instead to make a drink. It’s ridiculous with the front of his slacks pushed forward like an obscene pantomime act. She waits, not nearly as patient as she would like to appear for the sake of whatever he’s trying to do.

 

He only looks at her and sips his drink, contemplative for a moment, looking about the room in consideration.

 

She looks too, carefully measuring the pros and cons of where they might fuck.

 

“So, I guess I’m going to eat you out now. Right?”

 

She rises and moves past him, dress swaying. “No.”

 

“You’re all just talk, then.”

 

“No,  _ now _ I’m going to sit on your face.”

 

“Is that different?” he asks coming through the bedroom after her.

 

She drops her dress in answer.

 

“Seth worked you up that much, huh?” 

 

A roll of her eyes is the only thing she can manager, the liquor is starting to wear off and she wants to have fun before the guilt sets in. “Go lie down.”

 

“No shit?”

 

She nods, scowling.

 

He loosens his tie and sets his glasses on the nightstand, hops onto the bed shoes and all, ankles crossed. He’s grinning like a kid on Christmas over the whole idea of it, she rolls her eyes and slides the ridiculously uneconomic and ruined pair of panties he bought her down her legs.

 

“I knew those would look good on you,” he says.

 

“Shut up,” she says.

 

He mimics zippering his lips as she climbs onto the bed, he lies still and lets her approach, being good, for now. 

 

He keeps his eyes raised even when she’s level with his chin and the way he reaches hands up to put the rungs of the headboard in his palms and make them groan from how hard he tightens his grip on them is nothing if not hot.

 

She plants her knees higher and presses a palm to the wall, holds her other breast in her hand and she can no longer see his eyes but the heat of his mouth against the inside of her thighs makes her shaky, opening her knees wider is strange.

 

Her bravado is swiftly retreating, leaving her with her anxious exhale, there’s a muffled chuckle, his neck stretching up, lips pressing a warm, soft mimicry of something chaste against where she’s feels like the sun has warmed.

 

The headboard creaks and she touches her breast gently, fingers rasping over the nipple, circling and waiting for the slick glide of his tongue to open her up at the seams. 

 

 _Another-one-bites-the-dus_ t taps out woodenly from behind them, the do not disturb sign blatantly ignored or unobserved. The voice that follows is one she thought, hoped, at very least, would have followed its owner into an early grave.

 

It still might, she reasons.

 

“Open up or I’ll blow your house down, big bad wolf has come,” Tanner says from outside their door.

 

She pulls her thigh from over Richie’s face and doesn’t spend much time admiring his deeply etched scowl before she shifts and bounces just once on the mattresses and bounds up, away, the bathroom door slamming behind her and Richie muttering obscenities on his way towards the door..

 

He lets Tanner in and through the bathroom door she can hear everything, small blessing she’s been playing third wheel since she realized exactly how important she isn’t in the grand scheme if they might have chosen fragile human Freddie to help stall whatever apocalypse that’s about to pull into the station instead of begging her sufficiently for her help.

 

“Woah, woah, woah, let’s not go in guns blazing.” 

 

She can only guess what makes Tanner say that but once she’s wrapped herself into a bathrobe and walked back into the room she knows for sure it’s because Richie’s erection has ceased to flag from its sudden rise.

 

Tanner looks at her with all the enthusiasm as a shark towards a wounded seal, bleeding in the open ocean.

 

“Oh, did I interrupt a late night prayer session?” 

 

He kicks up her cast off underwear with the toe of his ostentatious black boot, spurs and skull bootstrap a touch overdoing things.

 

“La Perrla, very nice.”

 

It’s not anything but primal rage that has her hand reaching for the table where Richie’s deposited his wallet, phone and obsidian, the knife flies and sticks and there’s blood all over the white carpet and her panties are stuck to the scaled hand that’s ceased fondling them.

 

“Ouch!”

 

Scales fall over the interlopers face suddenly enough that Kate barely catches Richie’s rise in response.

 

The knife is pulled and the suck of skin is grotesque.

 

“Not nice, sister christian.”

 

Kate crosses her arms. “What do you want, creep?”

 

“Not in the mood for a little two on one?”

 

Richie snorts, then leers. “You can be the bottom, no safe words.”

 

Tanner’s scales slide back as he inhales smuggly enough for Kate to want to choke him with his garish bolo.

 

“Don’t offer what you can’t back up. I can stretch to accommodate, not that I’d need to.”

 

“Eww.” Kate can feel her nose crinkle.

 

“What do you want, Professor?”

 

“We’re meeting tomorrow in the downstairs conference room, eleven o’clock. At night.”

 

“You needed to tell us that in person?” Richie asks, nonplussed.

 

“Well,” Tanner leers again, looking down at the ripped panties, fallen against the bed skirt. “I wanted to say hello to Katie Cakes too, of course. We’ve got a long standing relationship.”

 

“Just because you tried to sacrifice me doesn’t make us friends,” she glares. 

 

He grins like a candy skull.

 

The way their unwelcome guest is launched from the room is impressive, how quickly it happens only leaves time enough for her hair to fluff up and settle before the door is shut and soundly barred to guests for the rest of the night.

 

Alone again Richie’s eyes fall to the obsidian bloody on the table and her underwear on the ground. 

 

“Put these back on,” he tells her, offering them out to her on thick fingers.

 

“I can’t, they’re ruined. I didn’t bring any more clothes.”

 

“Nice.” He grins.

 

“Asshole.”

 

“Put them on anyway, I can pretend you’re a real girl that’s on her period.”

 

The urge has passed but she relents and it’s only once he’s swept and pushed her to her back against the bed that something rises in her. Something small and girlish and all pretend, it’s no less thrilling than the real thing.

 

“I am a real girl, dickface.”

 

“Not with those eyes you’re not.”

 

She squeezes them shut and waits to be touched. 

 

His hands don’t descend and the mattress doesn’t dip.

 

He stands at the end of the bed staring down at where he’s thrown her like he’s still deciding what he’d like to do with her, she knows what they’re going to do.

 

“Let’s do it like normal people.”

 

“I don’t know if you can keep fangs out of it,” he says.

 

“Can you?”

 

“Sounds tantric.”

 

She sits up and drags his hips in by the belt loops.

* * *

 

  
  


When she tells Freddie he’s not going over the phone the next morning, that it’s the trade she’s made for her immortal strength, he’s almost incredulous.

 

“Because of a  _ cat _ ?” he asks.

 

“Yes,” she answers the receiver, rolling her eyes. “And because you have a family that needs you, I don’t have anyone to miss me if we don’t make it back from hell.”   
  


“ _ If _ you don’t, I’ll still have to fight this thing anyways.”

 

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

 

He answers only softly enough for her to hear, “Yeah…”

 

She shakes her head, if she’s going to do this, she’ll do it right, not like the first time around. There will be no more unwillingly made monsters in the world. 

 

“You have to see your granddaughter being born, and who else is gonna watch her while Billy’s at school and her boyfriend’s at work?” she says, knowing that this is how she reasons with him, sentimentality and pulling heartstrings.

 

He laughs. 

 

“Hopefully I can pawn it onto Margaret, sometimes. Lord knows my back’s aged with the rest of me, picking up babies is only a part time job now.”

 

“Does she know what it is yet?”

 

“Too early to tell.”

 

“Probably another girl.”

 

He snorts. “Lord willing. I ain’t been taught to raise boys, and if he’s half as hard headed as his abuelo, we’re in trouble.”

 

“I believe that,” she says.

 

“So what do I do with the cat?”

 

“Not much. She comes to you when she wants attention, but she likes girls better. Just keep her food bowl full. Don’t try to take her outside she gets Vietnam flashbacks from her stray days, she likes running water better than still but I have a special dish I got her I’ll give you for that. Oh, and  _ don’t _ bring her around the baby. She gets skittish at loud noises. Just let her hide when it comes over.” She wants to say more, to give him a list of all Slither’s likes and dislikes, the special spots to scratch, but there isn’t enough time and he’s going to have to learn for himself anyways.

 

“Got it.”

 

“We’ll meet up before we head to Mexico to meet Santanico.”

 

There’s a long silence from his end of the line before, finally, he says, “Thank you, Kate.”

 

Her eyes burn like she could cry for a future she’s always dreamed yet can never have, but Freddie’s got that, he deserves to live it after all the shit he’s been dragged through because of the Geckos. She’s chosen to break the horse’s legs already, it doesn’t matter if  she shoots it in the head, too. 

 

“Don’t mention it,” she says before hanging up.

 

They plan to stay another day and night at the hotel before they head out to face their “destiny” for the third time of her unending life.

 

After her call to Freddie she comes out to find Richie gone, a note on the nightstand on his side of the bed, his elegant attempt at chicken scratch telling her he’s gone to feed. She bristles her scales, hungry, but not the glutton he is. 

 

Sometimes it’s up to ten victims a week if he’s feeling extra cruel, while she’s only ever managed four. Even if she’s stopped letting herself waste to nothing, she won’t sate the hunger completely. It’s the only thing that’s ever made her feel something close to human since she suddenly wasn’t.

 

A ring at the door comes as she’s brushing fingers through her hair on Richie’s side of the bed. She answers it and finds a sheepish bell boy who seems more shocked to find her on the other side of the door .

 

“Um, Mr. Gecko sent these for you, um, Miss.” He holds up a box that she can smell linen and fabric softener behind the nervous spike of the boy’s blood. 

 

She understands why he’s so confused now, his boss sending a teenage girl clothes.

 

“Thanks,” she says, reaching for them, and in a spark of humor adds, “He’s my daddy.”

 

The bell boy’s eyes go wide, isn’t sure which way she means it but doesn’t have time to ask before she gives him a megawatt smile and closes the door in his face.

 

She opens the box on the way back to the bed, frowns at its contents. There’s a white sundress and sandals inside, exactly identical to an outfit he had bought her during their time in Mexico.  While it’s nice nice of him to have sent her clothes, to think of it even considering she didn’t, the last thing she’s wanted is for him to be so sentimental about it. 

 

She’s ashamed to think of how much she’d worn that dress, how sad she’d been sad when she’d lost it after leaving him in the middle of Mexico. The fact that he’s kept it this long and in such good condition makes her insides slither like she’s still got Santanico’s pet inside of her.

 

Sighing, she thinks to call Richie and tell him to bring her another outfit, but doesn’t fold. If Seth wants to play games she isn’t going to be the first to back down.

 

By the time Richie’s back she’s dressed, ready, he eyes her outfit but doesn’t ask where it’s come from, he probably already knows.

 

They meet Seth in the lobby and he’s dressed in another nice suit like the night before, Richie wolf whistles at him. “Is that Gucci, bro? What are you, a bookie now?”

 

Seth rolls his eyes. “It’s what the cool kids are wearing now, Dick.”

 

“Maybe in Twenty-Fifteen.”

 

“You’re one to talk, looking like the pit boss from Casino that gets beat on with the emergency line,” Seth parries.

 

The comment sours Richie’s mood considerably.

 

They leave the hotel without comment, Kate questions where they’re headed; the chauffeur steadily avoiding looking at the odd threesome in the back, but she can tell he’s listening.

 

“We’re taking you shopping, princess,” Seth tells her.

 

She balks but Richie calms her, saying that most of it will be looking for weapons and ammunition, just a small part for finding her a new wardrobe because he’s been telling Seth for years how threadbare and ratty her old ones have become. 

 

She tries to argue but it’s futile, she can see the driver eyeing her in the rearview with worry, she just smiles at him.

 

The shops in the city have changed considerably in the two decades since she’s been here, no longer does Hot Topic sit beside a Panda Express. 

 

There’s more technology and less employees. 

 

They take her to the ritziest shops, she gags at the prices but before she can complain Seth is scanning them at the self checkout and paying off  his phone with just a tap. She realizes now just how much of a Ms. Havisham she’s been while times have changed. 

 

Somewhere between Chanel and Fendi Richie leaves them to look at luggage large enough to accommodate their more unwieldy calibres

 

Seth asks if she wants fried ice-cream, pointing to a pagoda shaped like a margarita bowl, remembers how much she loved it when she was human. “I know it’s different now,” he shrugs. “But he’s gonna be awhile.”

 

She follows him into line, people stare when he puts his hand on the small of her back as they wait, she leans into his side, their bodies have been apart for a long time, but they still know how to sync up.

 

He orders her fudge-ripple and himself plain vanilla, she pushes his buttons with an innuendo about never knowing he was so simple in the bedroom, he tells her she’s been spending too much time around his brother. 

 

They eat on the bench outside beside the fake acrylic ice rink cordoned off for the season.

 

And even though she’s trying to be reserved, diminutive, as benign as possible, silence between them has never been exactly comfortable.

 

She’s the first to open her mouth. “There’s a good chance you’re not going to survive a third time against some evil band of South American chimera god-demon lords.”

 

Seth scoffs. “Third time? Please, I’ve still had to run things down here while you and Richard played mommies and daddies.”

 

She’s startled by his tone, but not surprised by the topic. It’s been on the edge of his tongue for a day and half and she doesn’t quite know how to answer his gentle teasing. It doesn’t matter, she smiles and laughs first. “So, you and Richie…” he starts, always the first to open Pandora’s box.

 

She’s quick to bite, “It’s not really like that.”

 

“He’s used to send me your underwear, you know? How perverse is that?”

 

“I don’t know, how fucked up is it that I could call you daddy now and people would buy it?” she arches a brow, he cups his chin in his hand and stares at her like a jackal.

 

“Opens up a whole new type of cover for us. What would you say to sticking around here for awhile, after we’re done kicking ancient aztec ass?”

 

She wavers, she doesn’t know if she should answer him truthfully. “I’ll think about it.”

 

He isn’t asking for anything more, she’s grateful.

* * *

 

  
  


Richie finds them eventually, something about his mood has shifted even more for the worse, he says he’s ready to go and both she and Seth know better than to argue with him.

 

They call for a driver back to the hotel, the time spent in silence. 

 

Richie leaves her and Seth in the lobby without comment, she says her goodnights and follows after him, wanting to know what’s made him such an asshole, all of a sudden.

 

He’s already changed by the time she makes it back to their room.

 

“I’m going out.” He doesn’t look at her when he says it.

 

“I thought you ate this morning?”

 

“I did.”

 

“Still hungry?”

 

“No. I just want to hunt something.”

 

“Because that’s the definition of well adjusted,” she scoffs, sits on the edge of the bed and starts unfastening her sandals.

 

“Do you want to eat my brother or just know what his dick tastes like?”

 

The sudden animosity leaves her quiet in reply for a few terse moments, she looks at the ground as she answers, “At least Seth doesn’t try to secretly get me high by eating junkies before scratching at my bedroom door.”

 

“He just brings you your old clothes to dress up in so he can forget how old he got.”

 

She rolls her eyes, chucks a sandal at the side of his head, he turns and lets it him him, stares dispassionately down at it lying on the plush carpeting. 

 

“You’re jealous,” she accuses.

 

“No shit,” he snorts, there’s real envy behind his false lenses, real pain. She hadn’t expected there to be. “You spend the past decade playing house with me, giving it up, then kicking me off because you think it absolves you of wanting it. I never left you like he did, I came back. He didn’t give a shit, he never came looking and you act like he’s the fucking sun.”

 

“I think in your past life he was Hunahpu, and you were Xbalanque,” is all she has to answer.

 

“Yeah, well in this life you’re still a bitch.”

 

She doesn’t give him the satisfaction of wincing. “He did come back. The first time. But, you don’t remember because you were upstairs choosing Santanico over your brother. Tanner was going to sacrifice me like all the other girls, like you cut that woman’s eyes out. And it wasn’t you saving me then. I’ve got receipts too, Richie.”

 

He doesn’t answer, instead he turns and leaves, doesn’t even bother to slam the door behind him, emotionless.

 

She stays still on the bed for only a moment before she thinks to chase after him, guilty, there’s something about being near Seth that’s made her feel that again. 

 

It takes a moment to get her shoes on, she uses the stairs but he’s still faster, his scent long gone once she reaches the lot. Sighing, she thinks to go back to the room but decides against it, doesn’t want to be waiting when he comes home still throwing his tantrum, she’ll let him drink and sleep it off, she’ll do the same.

 

The bar’s less busy than the night before, it’d been a Saturday, meant for sin, now patrons are quietly sleeping away their indiscretions.

 

She goes to the counters and orders four shots of tequila again, this time the bartender doesn’t question her, just does as told. His eyes shoot over her shoulder as he serves it, she follows them and finds Seth sitting in a different booth this time, there are girls and elaborate businessmen around his sides, but when her eyes meet his he shoos them with a wave of fingers.

 

Her walk to him is slow, she sways her hips softly to the music while sipping at her glass, he watches-- he’s always liked to watch her.

 

When she sits there isn’t an inch of space between them, the heat from his thigh warms her frozen skin. “I want you to take me to bed,” she tells him over the cacophony.

 

He looks at her only softly, she thinks he’s going to ask her if she’s sure and ruin the whole thing. Instead he puts his glass to his mouth and chugs, she watches the bob of his adam’s apple as she stands, waits for him to do the same and put his suit jacket back on, he motions for her to go first, to take the lead.

 

The walk to the elevator is silent, he uses a set of keys to take them to the top floor, the penthouse. 

 

“I remember once when you were high, you asked me if I was a virgin,” she says as he opens the door.

 

“Oh, yeah?”

 

“Yeah,” she says, sliding past him into the room of glitz and glam. “I didn’t say anything, but you knew. You made fun of me about Kyle, my first boyfriend. And asked me why he didn’t fuck me in a honeymoon suite on prom night, how he let me go.”

 

“Fuck,” he says, running a hand down his aged face. “I hope you decked me for it.”

 

She shrugs, spies the door to the bedroom through the elaborate round, makes a curve for it and he follows. “I just tucked you in an’ let you sleep. Besides,” she smiles. “I never made it to prom, anyway.”

 

His own grin back is a small, anemic thing.

 

“Why the hell were you ever nice to me, Kate? God knows I didn’t deserve it.” He’s standing in  the doorway waiting for her permission to enter.

 

She sits on the bed and pats the spot next to her, he takes a few steps in but doesn’t sit. 

 

“God forgives. Besides, I wanted it to be you at that point anyways.”

 

His only answer is looking at the floor, she knows that he knows that he didn’t deserve that kind of gift, what she still considered one at the time. 

 

“I’m sorry, Kate,” he says, and maybe it’s too late, but she’ll take it.

 

“Stop filling the silence, Seth,” she says, taking off her shoes. “Give me something better to think about than our misery, for once.”

 

“Why now?” he asks, an edge in his tone like he’s upset she’s waited so long.

 

“Because we should have done this in Mexico, before everything happened,” she answers, clearing the space between them and pressing up close, on her toes smelling his aftershave and his last cigarette, his blood.

 

It isn’t a game with him, it’s a need to know what the differences are between him and his brother, if he’ll hold her after, if he likes things messy, if he asks nicely for what he wants from her. 

 

He needs, too, and need turns to love, in some fucked up way she’s grown familiar with that over the last handful of years.

 

It’s been that way with his brother, with more violence, she knows; they’re snakes, after all. 

 

And Seth is human like she’d been. 

 

She thinks of what might have happened if she’d stayed with him, wondering if they could’ve run away together if he wasn’t so fixated on his brother, in a version of their lives where they could’ve played house and robbed banks. There are days she’d prefer the Bonnie and Clyde narrative to the Lady Macbeth Richie so cooly compares her too when he’s fresh from a kill and drunk on more than just blood and pheromones, when it’s the power and the need to knock her down a peg winding him up. 

 

Once, she would have wanted things to be gentle but now she’s an animal, like Richie, and Seth is still only human.

 

Up against his shirt front he smells the same, but so much more delicious too because he’s been clean, his blood is divine; honey, smoke, oil and forest scented aftershave. 

 

She thinks about what she knows, how easy it is to suck when blood is thinned, how he still likes to drink a little too much to be good for him, and she thinks about sucking it from his thigh, pushing up from the tan length of it to press a bloody mouth to where the rest of his pulse would thump.

 

He laughs and it startles her from her landslide thoughts. 

 

“That would have been an awful way to pop your cherry.” 

 

“It was awful anyway,” she admits, not sad or raw about it, just a fact.

 

There’s no anger to take the place of his lost grin, boyish when he was wearing it, now he only looks paternal, worried. There are wrinkles on his brow she doesn’t remember seeing before.

 

“Did Richie...,” and he stops himself from saying more. 

 

He’s never been so wary with his own words, so careful. She likes his concern. 

 

She shakes her head, pulls away and takes herself away, stepping back, he needs the space, the air. 

 

She touches the things on his desk. 

 

“No, I did. I fed on him and things happened.” 

 

Kate considers the past, the things she remembers, mostly the after, mostly the ache of where his brother’s body has been inside of her. “I was barely…,” she stops when she almost says  _ human. _

 

He waits.

 

“I was barely a person anymore because I hadn’t been feeding.”  Her shrug feels flippant and Seth looks hurt by the truth. 

 

“It was years after he showed up,” she adds, trying to soften the blow, it doesn’t.

 

She changes the subject. “You might die, you know, not from what’s to come but from old age.” 

 

His scowl makes her smile.

 

“You don’t have to sleep with me if you don’t want to. I just always wanted to, with you,” she tells him. 

 

She puts her cheek to her shoulder in a way that a grown woman his own age wouldn’t, she’s always going to be half a woman and half a girl so she glances at him, shy and scheming all at once because he’s just as stuck in the past as she is and she might as well use it against him to make him the mark for once.

 

He smirks back because he’s probably already guessed, he’s never been stupid.

 

She smells it when he gets past half-hard to aching, the rush of the blood moving south, the spike of testosterone, she licks her teeth and he shifts uncomfortably, holding back, being cool. 

 

His voice has dropped low. “Just don’t call me daddy, it’s weird.” 

 

Kate smirks. “You’re lying.”

 

He takes his suit coat off and slings it over the back of the desk chair.

 

“If you’re so sure, then lead the way, princess.” 

 

His tone is devious and she knows exactly what he’s playing at. 

 

From there it becomes easy. 

 

Easy to take him by the hand and bring him out of him to the bed, to make him touch her. It has to be his choice because it’s her game.

 

She thinks of the simplest way to show him she wants him and suddenly other things are easy.

 

She shrugs out of her dress and shimmies it down her leg; he looks at her with something more fond than hunger and kinder than amusement, something that makes her heart ache. 

 

They won’t ever really get to have each other like this in anymore of their memories.

 

But, this is enough, she decides. 

 

Age has made him kinder like isolation has made her bitter and they’ve met in the middle to meld together, and she wraps fingers in his salt and pepper hair as he’s kissing her. 

 

It’s sweet, his mouth is lush and he isn’t demanding, just soft. She likes the way he rubs her back softly as they just sit there and make out, wistful and warm, he rumbles softly against her mouth and his whiskers tickle, her mouth is full of his tongue.

 

She goads him from his tie and shirt, his belt gives him trouble. 

 

He’s got arthritis in his hands, he tells her, and she’s struck again with his mortality, it makes her sad for a moment that she has to look away, thinking of how long it takes him to put his guns back together now. 

 

She gets the button and his fly for him while he dances fingers between her shoulders, surprisingly efficient at unclasping her bra, she looks at him and he smirks.

 

“Just because I’m old doesn’t mean I lost my game,” he tells her, nuzzling closer, smirking against the corner of her mouth.

 

Then they are kissing again and she’s hazy, she feels good,  _ he _ feels good. On her, inside of her, she holds a palm to his naked spine as he pumps into her slowly, until she’s asking for more, he’s willing to give but that doesn’t mean he won’t want to hear her beg for it.

 

He stretches her arms across the bed and gives her a few long slow glides of his cock before he’ll stop to put his mouth on her breasts and leave her panting. 

 

He makes it last and she wonders vainly if it’s because of her that he’s taking his time, working his way into her so thoroughly she’ll remember him in her marrow.

 

His human stamina only makes her appreciate him more, he has to hold her away from him after she starts pressing back, the shock of her letting him fill her, it’s too much too quick and he has to take it easy. 

 

He cums and she follows like he’s holding her hand and tugging her along.

 

She stretches and tries to tempt, he laughs.

 

“I’m old, kiddo.” 

 

His chest hair has not all gone gray, his arms are still strong, his body is slimmer around where he had muscles built up from jail and fear of being eaten by snake people if he didn’t bulk up, but his body needs time where she has only grown more hungry. He leaves the bed and pulls on his black briefs and sits in a chair by the window.

 

“Touch yourself for awhile, while I catch up.”

 

She startles, rising up fast on her elbows and gawking. It isn’t half a taunt the way his brother would say something like it, it isn’t a dare, it’s a gentle request to humor him and she finds that she wants to. 

 

She remembers again that he’s always liked to watch her. 

 

Even the first moment she saw him, suddenly in her orbit, a stomp on the breaks, a jerk into his gaze. 

 

She knows he was already scheming his get away as soon as he saw the Winnebago pull into the lot, but, at first, he’d been looking right at her. He’d sipped his beer so leisurely, she’d gone hot with adrenaline from almost hitting him, from a grown man’s eyes on her, looking slow, she’d been ashamed of her fixation of the way he’d swallowed. 

 

She remembered him later, in the hotel room, even with Richie at her back, her eyes were fixated on Seth’s.

 

She touches herself and he watches, she’s messy with his cum but he’s smiling like any other man would, visual creature, possessive creature, she lets him have his kinks, having found a few of her own as she grew up.

 

“I’ve never done this for Richie,” she tells him because she wants to hear his heartbeat bump harder. She smiles at the ceiling, she can almost smell how proud he is of himself.

 

They all have their kinks.

 

Her shoulders rub deeper into the mattress, some luxurious looking stretch that makes her breasts push towards the ceiling and her soles arch. It’s a lie that doesn’t feel like a lie, Richie has watched her but he’s never asked and she’s never acquiesced to whatever feelings he’s kept unvoiced. 

 

Seth’s stare is like a cat’s, lazy and indulgent, half-given and she falls into it, it makes her blood hot and her lust to spike and it’s easy to be something he likes looking at.

 

His skin is sunburn warm when he settles himself on the floor before the edge of the bed, he pulls down her knees and moves her hand away, rubbing his beard over sensative skin, bottom lip dragging over her sex, she shivers.

 

“Are you even tired?” he asks, genuinely curious.

 

“Only for a little while.” She admits.

 

“Real little,” he grumbles before he lowers his head. She grins the way he used to, like a wolf even when he’s the one devouring her, she laughs at the ceiling.

 

They stay up well beyond past his usual bedtime, she can tell. He’s tired.

 

She’s worn him out, but he’s awake for her and it’s past 2 a.m..

 

He spoons softly at her side after they’ve both cum again, this time together once more, the intimacy of it sad in a way. She’s curled into him, it’s the most intimate she has ever been with anyone. “Did you love me?” she asks, her voice is soft. She doesn’t need him to love her, she knows that she can’t tell for sure if she loves anything anymore at all.

 

He’s sad eyes and soft hands on her face. “I didn’t know how, Katie, always was sorry about that. I was a bad man, I’m not much better now. Maybe I could be what you needed then, if I wasn’t so fucking old, I’m  _ still  _ fucking old.”

 

He’s lying. 

 

They would never pass in a high school hallway and smile at each other in genuine, reciprocal admiration or camaraderie. 

 

“It seems like it’s always right place wrong time for us,” she says, trying to be kind and thinking about what could have been not believing in it. 

 

The way he kisses her forehead is paternal. 

 

Kisa was right, she’s still so young.

 

“Do you love Richie?”

 

She lifts her mouth from the inside of his arm to answer. 

 

“He saved my life and sometimes I feel like I’ll never be done trying to find the right way to prove that I’m thankful he did that.” She stops and bites gently at his wrist, his chuckle is a rumble against the back of her head. 

 

“But, something’s been dead in me since Scott died. He makes me feel like I’m still something that deserves to be alive.”

 

“Keep taking care of him when I’m gone,” Seth tells her, with a yawn edging up on his tone, or maybe just something sadder.

 

Her voice is steady but her cheeks are wet and the pillowcase is damp. 

 

“Ok.”  

 

Seth keeps mouthing over the back of her neck, kisses and dreamt promises from a past they never really shared because she’d been a kid and he’d been a fuck-up, together they’d been a class act that was always half martyr and half desperado. 

 

She feels like a fucking Judas when she hears how the beat of his heart is just a bit off of steady.

 


End file.
